Top 500 Bell Hooks Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “For many men the moment of violent connection may be the only intimacy, the only attainable closeness, the only space where the agony is released.”

— Bell Hooks

302. “If improving conditions in the workplace for women had been a central agenda for feminist movement in conjunction with efforts to obtain better paying jobs for women and finding jobs for unemployed women of all classes, feminism would have been seen as a movement addressing the concerns of all women.”

— Bell Hooks

303. “If we were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades it’s meaning.”

— Bell Hooks

304. “Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure.”

— Bell Hooks

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

— Bell Hooks

306. “While it is positive for young black males and females to learn discipline and self-responsibility, those attitudes, values, and habits of being can be taught with pedagogical strategies that are liberatory, that do not rely on coercive control and punishment to reinforce positive behavior.”

— Bell Hooks

307. “The rhetoric of feminism with its emphasis on resistance, rebellion, and revolution created an illusion of militancy and radicalism that masked the fact that feminism was in no way a challenge or a threat to capitalist patriarchy.”

— Bell Hooks

308. “We have power as consumers. We can exercise that power all the time by not choosing to invest time, energy or funds to support the production of mass media images that do not reflect life-enhancing values, that undermine a love ethic.”

— Bell Hooks

309. “Erotic attention often serves as the catalyst for an intimate connection between two people, but it is not a sign of love.”

— Bell Hooks

310. “Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren.”

— Bell Hooks

311. “With reciprocity all things do not need to be equal in order for acceptance and mutuality to thrive. If equality is evoked as the only standard by which it is deemed acceptable for people to meet across boundaries and create community, then there is little hope. Fortunately, mutuality is a more constructive and positive foundation for the building of ties that allow for differences in status, position, power, and privilege whether determined by race, class, sexuality, religion, or nationality.”

— Bell Hooks

312. “Fluidity means that our black identities are constantly changing as we respond to circumstances in our families and communities of origin, and as we interact with a wider world.”

— Bell Hooks

313. “A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving... There can be no love without justice.”

— Bell Hooks

314. “I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that’s becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism.”

— Bell Hooks

315. “Most feminist groups began with women talking about how we saw ourselves and other women, how we acted. We openly confessed our fears and hatred of other women. We talked about how to combat jealousy, the politics of envy, and so on.”

— Bell Hooks

316. “Females of all ages acted as though concern for or rage at male domination or gender equality was all that was needed to make one a “feminist.” Without confronting internalized sexism women who picked up the feminist banner often betrayed the cause in their interactions with other women.”

— Bell Hooks

317. “It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self.”

— Bell Hooks

318. “When women internalized the idea that describing their own woe was synonymous with developing a critical political consciousness, the progress of the feminist movement was stalled.”

— Bell Hooks

319. “Feminism as a political movement has to specifically address the needs of men in their struggle to revolutionize their consciousness.”

— Bell Hooks

320. “It is not true that men are unwilling to change. It is true that many men are afraid to change. It is true that masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to let go the will to dominate.”

— Bell Hooks

321. “It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.”

— Bell Hooks

322. “We spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply where we simply did not know what to do.”

— Bell Hooks

323. “Most gay men are as sexist in their thinking as are heterosexuals. Their patriarchal thinking leads them to construct paradigms of desirable sexual behaviour that is similar to that of patriarchal straight men.”

— Bell Hooks

324. “Most of us find it difficult to accept a definition of love that says we are never loved in a context where there is abuse.”

— Bell Hooks

325. “One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends.”

— Bell Hooks

326. “The feeling that I’ve done something wrong, that I really don’t know what it is, that there’s something terribly wrong with my very being, leads to a sense of utter hopelessness. This hopelessness is the deepest cut of the mystified state. It means there is no possibility for me as I am; there is no way I can matter or be worthy of anyone’s love as long as I remain myself. I must find a way to be someone else – someone who is lovable. Someone who is not me.”

— Bell Hooks

327. “Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves “oppressed,” no one would have taken them seriously.”

— Bell Hooks

328. “We cannot fully create effective movements for social change if individuals struggling for that change are not also self-actualized or working towards that end. When wounded individuals come together in groups to make change our collective struggle it is often undermined by all that has not been dealt with emotionally.”

— Bell Hooks

329. “I have been contemplating the place and meaning of love in our lives and culture for years. When a subject attracts my intellectual and emotional imagination, I am long to observe it from all angles, to know it inside and out.”

— Bell Hooks

330. “To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism.”

— Bell Hooks

331. “What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.”

— Bell Hooks

332. “I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison.”

— Bell Hooks

333. “My effort and ability to learn was always contextualized within the framework of generational family experience. Certain behaviors, gestures, habits of being were traced back. Attending.”

— Bell Hooks

334. “Masses of the people think that feminism is always the only about women seeking to be equal to men. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”

— Bell Hooks

335. “Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?”

— Bell Hooks

336. “To critique sexist images without offering alternatives is an incomplete intervention. Critique in and of itself does not lead to change.”

— Bell Hooks

337. “Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love. When we see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build the necessary foundation for self-love.”

— Bell Hooks

338. “No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively. Yet parents do this all the time in our culture. Children are told that they are loved even though they are being abused.”

— Bell Hooks

339. “We don’t hear much from revolutionary feminists who are white because they’re not serving the bourgeois agenda of the status quo.”

— Bell Hooks

340. “I think I was always obsessed with esthetics.”

— Bell Hooks

341. “We learn to love men more because they will not love us. If they dared to love us, in patriarchal culture they would cease to be real “men.”

— Bell Hooks

342. “While it has become “cool” for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.”

— Bell Hooks

343. “One of the most important social myths we must debunk if we are to become a more loving culture is the one that teaches parents that abuse and neglect can coexist with love. Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love.”

— Bell Hooks

344. “Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.”

— Bell Hooks

345. “The truth is, far too many people in our culture do not know what love is. And this not knowing feels like a terrible secret, a lack that we have to cover up.”

— Bell Hooks

346. “To practice the art of loving we have first to choose love – admit to ourselves that we want to know love and be loving even if we do not know what that means. The deeply cynical, who have lost all belief in love’s power, have to step blindly out on faith.”

— Bell Hooks

347. “I dreamed about a culture of belonging. I still dream that dream. I contemplate what our lives would be like if we knew how to cultivate awareness, to live mindfully, peacefully; if we learned habits of being that would bring us closer together, that would help us build beloved community.”

— Bell Hooks

348. “This fear of maleness that they inspire estranges men from every female in their lives to greater or lesser degrees, and men feel the loss. Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust.”

— Bell Hooks

349. “Feminism as a theoretical enterprise is approached differently by Black women depending on where we are. There are more reformist Black women who tend to use the phrase “Black feminism”.”

— Bell Hooks

350. “Psychological patriarchy is a “dance of contempt,” a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them.”

— Bell Hooks