Top 500 Bell Hooks Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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.”

— Bell Hooks

354. “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

355. “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

356. “From childhood on, I found many of my angels in favorite authors, writers who created books that enabled me to understand life with greater complexity. These works opened my heart to compassion, forgiveness, and understanding.”

— Bell Hooks

357. “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

358. “Boys learn to cover up grief with anger; the more troubled the boy, the more intense the mask of indifference. Shutting down emotionally is the best defense when the longing for connection must be denied.”

— Bell Hooks

359. “From the moment little boys are taught they should not cry or express hurt, feelings of loneliness, or pain, that they must be tough, they are learning how to mask true feelings. In worst-case scenarios they are learning how to not feel anything ever.”

— Bell Hooks

360. “I had become hard for me to continue to believe in love’s promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power or the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love.”

— Bell Hooks

361. “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

362. “The fact that men use emotional withholding as a weapon of psychological terrorism is never discussed.”

— Bell Hooks

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

— Bell Hooks

364. “Love cannot coexist with domination.”

— Bell Hooks

365. “I would also say that, in practice, many more Americans are anarchists than would ever use that term.”

— Bell Hooks

366. “What the world needs now is liberated men who have the qualities Silverstein cites, men who are ‘empathetic and strong, autonomous and connected, responsible to self, to family and friends, to society, and capable of understanding how those responsibilities are, ultimately, inseparable.’ Men need feminist thinking. It it the theory that supports their spiritual evolution and their shift away from the patriarchal model. Patriarchy is destroying the well-being of men, taking their lives daily.”

— Bell Hooks

367. “The belittling of anyone’s attempt to name a context within they were wounded, were made a victim, is a form of shaming. It is psychological terrorism. Shaming breaks our hearts.”

— Bell Hooks

368. “The misuse of the term matriarch has led many people to identify any woman present in a household where no male resides a matriarch. Although anthropologists disagree about whether or not matriarchal societies ever really existed, an examination of available information about the supposed social structure of matriarchies proves without any doubt that the social status of the matriarch was in no way similar to that of black women in the United States.”

— Bell Hooks

369. “Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.”

— Bell Hooks

370. “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

371. “As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing.”

— Bell Hooks

372. “Black women control the world. We are through being discriminated against.”

— Bell Hooks

373. “Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.”

— Bell Hooks

374. “No matter that information abounds that lets the public know that gay males come from two-parent homes and can be macho and women-hating, misguided assumptions about what makes a male gay still flourish. Every day boys who express feelings are psychologically terrorized, and in extreme cases brutally beaten, by parents who fear that a man of feeling must be homosexual. Gay men share with straight men the same notions about acceptable masculinity.”

— Bell Hooks

375. “One of the things I find most exciting is talking with people who are working with my work. Who are using it in some way with their life to address everyday politics of meaning.”

— Bell Hooks

376. “To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.”

— Bell Hooks

377. “Valuing ourselves rightly means we understand love to be the only foundation of being that will sustain us in both times of lack and times of plenty.”

— Bell Hooks

378. “Cynicism is the greatest barrier to love. It is rooted in doubt and despair. Fear intensifies our doubt. It paralyzes. Faith and hope allow us to let go. Fear stands in the way of love.”

— Bell Hooks

379. “All other spiritual teachings are in vain if we cannot love. Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if, with our hearts, we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given. What matters is how we live. – Jack Kornfield.”

— Bell Hooks

380. “I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.”

— Bell Hooks

381. “All too often in our society it is assumed that one can know all there is to know about black people by merely hearing the life story and opinions of one black person.”

— Bell Hooks

382. “Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them.”

— Bell Hooks

383. “I had the strength to rebel, but I did not have the strength to let go.”

— Bell Hooks

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

— Bell Hooks

385. “Love allows us to confront these negative realities in a manner that is life-affirming and life enhancing.”

— Bell Hooks

386. “Women’s liberationists, white and black, will always be at odds with one another as long as our idea of liberation is based on having the power white men have. For that power denies unity, denies common connections, and is inherently divisive.”

— Bell Hooks

387. “A very hurting thing for Black Americans – to feel that we can’t love our enemies. People forget what a great tradition we have as African-Americans in the practice of forgiveness and compassion. And if we neglect that tradition, we suffer.”

— Bell Hooks

388. “Woman-identified women, whether straight, bisexual, or lesbian rarely make garnering male approval a priority in our lives. This is why we threaten the patriarchy. Lesbian women who have a patriarchal mindset are far less threatening to men than feminist women, gay or straight, who have turned their gaze and their desire from the patriarchy, away from sexist men.”

— Bell Hooks

389. “Wisely, Baldwin insisted that we are always more than our pain. Not only did he believe in our capacity to love, he felt black people were uniquely situated to risk loving because we had suffered.”

— Bell Hooks

390. “Running fron the pain, they never know the fullness of love’s pleasure.”

— Bell Hooks

391. “In everyday life males and females alike are relatively silent about love. Our silence shields us from uncertainty. We want to know love. We are simply afraid the desire to know too much about love will lead us closer and closer to the abyss of lovelessness.”

— Bell Hooks

392. “What’s really sad is that so many young women between the ages of 16 and 25 are ignorant and they already believe that women get the same pay as men. They don’t even really understand that equality hasn’t happened with the pay force.”

— Bell Hooks

393. “When the environment you live in and know most intimately does not place value on loving, a spiritual life provides a place of solace and renewal.”

— Bell Hooks

394. “While emotional needs are difficult, and often are impossible to satisfy, material desires are easier to fulfill.”

— Bell Hooks

395. “To take the inherent positive sexuality of males and turn it into violence is the patriarchal crime that is perpetuated against the male body, a crime that masses of men have yet to possess the strength to report.”

— Bell Hooks

396. “Love does not lead to an end to difficulties, it provides us with the means to cope with our difficulties in ways that enhance our growth.”

— Bell Hooks

397. “If we succeed without confronting and changing shaking foundation of low self-esteem rooted in contempt of hatred, we will falter along the way.”

— Bell Hooks

398. “Supporting what in effect became white power reformist feminism enabled the mainstream white supremacist patriarchy to bolster its power while simultaneously undermining the radical politics of feminism.”

— Bell Hooks

399. “They wanted black women to conform to the gender norms set by white society. They wanted to be recognized as ‘men,’ as patriarchs, by other men, including white men. Yet they could not assume this position if black women were not willing to conform to prevailing sexist gender norms. Many black women who has endured white-supremacist patriarchal domination during slavery did not want to be dominated by black men after manumission.”

— Bell Hooks

400. “Romantic love as most people understand it in patriarchal culture makes one unaware, renders one powerless and out of control. Feminist thinkers called attention to the way this notion of love served the interests of patriarchal men and women. It supported the notion that one could do anything in the name of love: beat people, restrict their movements, even kill them and call it a “crime of passion,” plead, “I love her so much i had to kill her.”

— Bell Hooks