Top 500 Bell Hooks Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Bell Hooks

353. “No significant body of feminist writing addresses boys directly, letting them know how they can construct an identity that is not rooted in sexism. There is no body of feminist children’s literature that can serve as an alternative to patriarchal perspectives, which abound in the world of children’s books.”

— Bell Hooks

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Bell Hooks

358. “At times women find it difficult to hear what men have to say when what they tell us does not conform to our fantasies of who they are or who we want them to be.”

— Bell Hooks

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Bell Hooks

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Bell Hooks

371. “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

372. “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

373. “Love cannot coexist with domination.”

— Bell Hooks

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Bell Hooks

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Bell Hooks

384. “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

385. “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

386. “With therapeutic help, I was able to see the term dysfunctional as useful description and not as an absolute negative judgment.”

— Bell Hooks

387. “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

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

— Bell Hooks

389. “What’s so amazing about this historical moment is that it is bringing class to the fore and we have to think about the nature of work and hierarchy.”

— Bell Hooks

390. “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

391. “I have had the pain of fragmentation deeply impressed upon my consciousness. The alienation felt by many people who are concerned about domination – the struggle we have even to make of our words a language that can be shared, understood.”

— Bell Hooks

392. “While the will to love is present in very young children, they still need guidance in the ways of love.”

— Bell Hooks

393. “It is particularly distressing that so many recent books on love continue to insist that definitions of love are unnecessary and meaningless. Or worse, the authors suggest love should mean something different to men than it does to women – that the sexes should respect and adapt to our inability to communicate since we do not share the same language. This type of literature is popular because it does not demand a change in fixed ways of thinking about gender roles, culture or love.”

— Bell Hooks

394. “Confronting the endless desire that is at the heart of our individual overconsumption and global excess is the only intervention that can ward off the daily call to consume that bombards us on all sides.”

— Bell Hooks

395. “None of us should be ashamed to speak of our class power or lack of it. Overcoming fear, even the fear of being immodest, and acting courageously to bring issues of class- especially radical standpoints – into the discourse of blackness is a gesture of militant defiance, one that runs counter to bourgeois insistence that we think of “money” in particular and class in general as private matters.”

— Bell Hooks

396. “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

397. “Individual members of certain churches in black communities should protest when worship services become a platform for teaching anti-gay sentiments. Often individuals sit and listen to preachers raging against gay people and think the views expressed are amusing and outmoded, and dismiss them without challenge. But if homophobia is to be eradicated in black communities, such attitudes must be challenged.”

— Bell Hooks

398. “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

399. “There seems to be a fear that if men are raised to be people of integrity, people who can love, they will be unable to be forceful and act violently if needed... We see that females that are raised with the traits any person of integrity embodies can act with tenderness, with assertiveness, and with aggression if and when aggression is needed.”

— Bell Hooks

400. “It was an accepted fact among black people that the leaders who were most revered and respected were men. Black activists defined freedom as gaining the right to participate as full citizens in American culture; they were not rejecting the value system of that culture. Consequently, they did not question the rightness of patriarchy.”

— Bell Hooks