Top 500 Bell Hooks Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “When men lie to women, presenting a false self, the terrible price they pay to maintain “power over” us is the loss of their capacity to give and receive love.”

— Bell Hooks

155. “Without trust there can be no genuine intimacy and love.”

— Bell Hooks

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

— Bell Hooks

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

— Bell Hooks

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Bell Hooks

161. “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

162. “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

163. “Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love’s path is communication.”

— Bell Hooks

164. “In an imperialist racist patriarchal society that supports and condones oppression, it is not surprising that men and women judge their worth, their personal power, by their ability to oppress others.”

— Bell Hooks

165. “It is crucial for the future of the Black liberation struggle that we remain ever mindful that ours is a shared struggle, that we are each other’s fate.”

— Bell Hooks

166. “How different things might be if, rather than saying “I think I’m in love,” we were saying “I’ve connected with someone in a way that makes me think I’m on the way to knowing love... ” Or if instead of saying “I am in love” we said “I am loving” or “I will love.”

— Bell Hooks

167. “I think our culture doesn’t recognize passion, because real passion has the power to disrupt boundaries.”

— Bell Hooks

168. “When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat.”

— Bell Hooks

169. “Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.”

— Bell Hooks

170. “For black men of all ages it is more acceptable to express rage than to give voice to emotional needs.”

— Bell Hooks

171. “To be oppressed means to be deprived of your ability to choose.”

— Bell Hooks

172. “The need for instant gratification is a component of greed.”

— Bell Hooks

173. “There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.”

— Bell Hooks

174. “I learned then that it is more fulfilling to live one’s life within a circle of love, interacting with loved ones to whole we are committed.”

— Bell Hooks

175. “Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear – against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect – to find ourselves in the other.”

— Bell Hooks

176. “The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.”

— Bell Hooks

177. “Teachers of children see gender equality mostly in terms of ensuring that girls get to have the same privileges and rights as boys within the existing social structure; they do not see it in terms of granting boys the same rights as girls – for instance, the right to choose not to engage in aggressive or violent play, the right to play with dolls, to play dress up, to wear costumes of either gender, the right to choose.”

— Bell Hooks

178. “I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words.”

— Bell Hooks

179. “Indeed, men who feel, who love, often hide their emotional awareness from other men for fear of being attacked and shamed. This is the big secret we all keep together – the fear of patriarchal maleness that binds everyone in our culture. We cannot love what we fear. That is why so many religious traditions teach us that there is no fear in love.”

— Bell Hooks

180. “Trust is the heartbeat of genuine love. And we trust that the attention our partners give friends, or vice versa, does not take anything away from us – we are not diminished. What we learn through experience is that our capacity to establish deep and profound connections in friendship strengthens all our intimate bonds.”

— Bell Hooks

181. “In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.”

— Bell Hooks

182. “In truth, true love is all about work.”

— Bell Hooks

183. “I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health.”

— Bell Hooks

184. “Few people who are hit once by someone they love respond in the way they might to a singular physical assault by a stranger.”

— Bell Hooks

185. “In our culture privacy is often confused with secrecy.”

— Bell Hooks

186. “Many of us learn as children that friendship should never be seen as just as important as family ties. However, friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community. Learning to love in friendships empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds.”

— Bell Hooks

187. “The willingness to sacrifice is a necessary dimension of loving practice and living in community. None of us can have things our way all the time. Giving up something is one way we sustain a commitment to the collective well-being. Our willingness to make sacrifices reflects our awareness of interdependency.”

— Bell Hooks

188. “Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhD’s, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.”

— Bell Hooks

189. “Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels.”

— Bell Hooks

190. “If you’re in a domestic situation where the man is violent, patriarchy and male domination – even though you understand it intersectionally – you focus, you highlight that dimension of it, if that’s what is needed to change the situation.”

— Bell Hooks

191. “By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult.”

— Bell Hooks

192. “I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love.”

— Bell Hooks

193. “We are often taught we have no control over our “feelings.” Yet most of us accept that we choose our actions, that intention and will inform what we do. We also accept that our actions have consequences.”

— Bell Hooks

194. “All over the world people live in intimate daily contact with one another. They wash together, eat and sleep together, face challenges together, share joy and sorrow. The rugged individual who relies on no one else is a figure who can only exist in a culture of domination where a privileged few use more of the world’s resources than the many who must daily do without. Worship of individualism has in part led us to the unhealthy culture of narcissism that is so all pervasive in our society.”

— Bell Hooks

195. “There is a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance, as location of radical openness and possibility.”

— Bell Hooks

196. “I’ve written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.”

— Bell Hooks

197. “Love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of self-love or of loving others we must move beyond the realm of feeling to actualize love.”

— Bell Hooks

198. “Part of the racialized sexism wants everyone to think that a 15-year old Mexican is not a girl, she’s a woman. We know she’s a girl. We can never emphasize this enough, because this is the fate of colored girls globally right now: the denial of their girlhood, the denial of their childhood, and the constant state of risk and danger they are living in.”

— Bell Hooks

199. “I think Black people need to take self-esteem seriously.”

— Bell Hooks

200. “Significantly, I am among those rare feminist theorists who believe that it is crucial for feminist movement to have as an overriding agenda ending all forms of violence.”

— Bell Hooks