Top 500 Bell Hooks Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Materialism creates a world of narcissism in which the focus of life is solely on acquisition and consumption.”

— Bell Hooks

102. “Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix and transform.”

— Bell Hooks

103. “The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.”

— Bell Hooks

104. “When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent, but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.”

— Bell Hooks

105. “Since we live in a society that promotes faddism and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change.”

— Bell Hooks

106. “Multiculturalism compels educators to recognize the narrow boundaries that have shaped the way knowledge is shared in the classroom. It forces us all to recognize our complicity in accepting and perpetuating biases of any kind.”

— Bell Hooks

107. “Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment... ‘dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love – which is to transform us.’ Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.”

— Bell Hooks

108. “Men do not wound women only when they act violently and abusively. They wound us when they fail to protect our freedom in every aspect of our daily lives.”

— Bell Hooks

109. “In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an antipatriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved. I.”

— Bell Hooks

110. “I’m so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.”

— Bell Hooks

111. “Sexism has always been a political stance mediating social domination, enabling white men and black men to share a common sensibility about sex roles and the importance of male domination.”

— Bell Hooks

112. “Education as the practice of freedom affirms healthy selfesteem in students as it promotes their capacity to be aware and live consciously. It teaches them to reflect and act in ways that further self-actualization, rather than conformity to the status quo.”

— Bell Hooks

113. “Love empowers us to live fully and die well. Death becomes, then, not an end to life but a part of living.”

— Bell Hooks

114. “Because we have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice.”

— Bell Hooks

115. “Overall women in our society are forgetting the value and power of sisterhood. Renewed feminist movement must once again raise the banner high to proclaim anew “Sistehood is powerful.”

— Bell Hooks

116. “When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.”

— Bell Hooks

117. “When we love children, we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights – that we respect and uphold their rights.”

— Bell Hooks

118. “Lying has become so much the accepted norm that people lie even when it would be simpler to tell the truth.”

— Bell Hooks

119. “Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we value and as a consequence how we know what we know as well as how we use what we know.”

— Bell Hooks

120. “If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them.”

— Bell Hooks

121. “We cannot teach boys that “real men” either do not feel or do not express feelings, then expect boys to feel comfortable getting in touch with their feelings.”

— Bell Hooks

122. “Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction.”

— Bell Hooks

123. “Justice demands integrity. It’s to have a moral universe – not only know what is right or wrong but to put things in perspective, weigh things. Justice is different from violence and retribution; it requires complex accounting.”

— Bell Hooks

124. “If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.”

— Bell Hooks

125. “Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.”

— Bell Hooks

126. “Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.”

— Bell Hooks

127. “Living simply makes loving simple.”

— Bell Hooks

128. “No level of individual self-actualization alone can sustain the marginalized and oppressed. We must be linked to collective struggle, to communities of resistance that move us outward, into the world.”

— Bell Hooks

129. “One of the things that we must do as teachers is twirl around and around, and find out what works with the situation that we’re in. Our models might not work. And that twirling, changing, is part of the empowerment.”

— Bell Hooks

130. “The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.”

— Bell Hooks

131. “The true teacher is within us. A good teacher is someone who can help you to go back and touch the true teacher within, because you already have the insight within you.”

— Bell Hooks

132. “The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.”

— Bell Hooks

133. “I’m tired of the naked, raped, beaten black woman body. I want to see an image of black femaleness that alters our universe in some way.”

— Bell Hooks

134. “Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.”

— Bell Hooks

135. “To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.”

— Bell Hooks

136. “Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

— Bell Hooks

137. “Most of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self-loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our well-being.”

— Bell Hooks

138. “In the dominator model the pursuit of external power, the ability to manipulate and control others, is what matters most. When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.”

— Bell Hooks

139. “Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us.”

— Bell Hooks

140. “Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it’s not unfamiliar to you. It’s always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.”

— Bell Hooks

141. “A male who has divested of male privilege, who has embraced feminist politics, is a worthy comrade in struggle, in no way a threat to feminism, whereas a female who remains wedded to sexist thinking and behavior infiltrating feminist movement is a dangerous threat.”

— Bell Hooks

142. “When we see love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love.”

— Bell Hooks

143. “I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.”

— Bell Hooks

144. “The choice to love is a choice to connect – to find ourselves in the other.”

— Bell Hooks

145. “I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded. If he was wounded, then how could he protect me? As.”

— Bell Hooks

146. “I get so tired of people acting like, you know, black men and women never help each other, never support each other.”

— Bell Hooks

147. “A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well.”

— Bell Hooks

148. “To be true to patriarchy we are all taught that we must keep men’s secrets.”

— Bell Hooks

149. “Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself. School.”

— Bell Hooks

150. “Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. I liked this definition because it does not imply that men were the enemy.”

— Bell Hooks