Top 45 bell hooks Quotes

To live fixated on the future is to engage in psychological denial. It is a form of psychic violence that prepares us to accept the violence needed to ensure the maintenance of imperialist, future-oriented society.

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

The people I love, I’m committed to loving for the rest of my life.

I feel like there is always something trying to pull us back into sleep, that there is this sort of seductive quality in all the hedonistic pleasures that pull on us.

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?

The working-class black Southern Christian culture I come from still nurtures me, and I mean directly, daily.

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

I love my family, even as I critique their dysfunctionalities.

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.

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.

Class is more than money. Class is also about knowledge.

In this culture, the phrase ‘black woman’ is not synonymous with ‘tender,’ or ‘gentle.’ It’s as if those words couldn’t possibly speak to the reality of black females.

I have always been a flirt. My mother says whe I was a child, I used to stand outside the house and just smile at everyone who walked by. Like, ‘Please take me with you!’

It really fascinates me what white people are allowed to write about.

Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things.

For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

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.

I’m such a girl for the living room. I really like to stay in my nest and not move. I travel in my mind, and that that’s a rigorous state of journeying for me. My body isn’t that interested in moving from place to place.

I think I was always obsessed with esthetics.

Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.

Using pseudonyms was such a part of the early feminist movement. We didn’t want to have this star system. We wanted attention on the ideas, not the persona of the writer.

The institutionalization of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, all of these things, led to a sense that the struggle was over for a lot of people and that one did not have to continue the personal consciousness-raising and changing of one’s viewpoint.

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.

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

I told my parents when I was 12 I’d be a writer.

A major part of love is commitment. If we are committed to someone, if I’m committed to loving you, then it’s not possible for me to ‘fall out of love.’

All the men I fall for seem to have a commitment problem.

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.

All over the world, young males and females, schooled in the art of patriarchal thinking, are building an identity on a foundation that sees the will to do violence as the essential way to assert being.

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

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

Live simply so that others may simply live.

But love is really more of an interactive process. It’s about what we do not just what we feel. It’s a verb, not a noun.

It’s in the act of having to do things that you don’t want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.

No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women… When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.

An often-repeated assertion in the body of film criticism I have written is the assertion that movies do not just mirror the culture of any given time; they also create it.

Many spiritual teachers – in Buddhism, in Islam – have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.

Certainly we can end racism with love. We can demand that the federal government change its emphasis on racial distinction.

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

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

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

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love.

Since anti-racist individuals did not control mass media, the media became the primary tool that would be used and is still used to convince black viewers, and everyone else, of black inferiority.

There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it’s the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.