Certainly we can end racism with love. We can demand that the federal government change its emphasis on racial distinction. – bell hooks
Whenever women struggle with breast cancer and face better care than ever, that’s feminism. – bell hooks
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. – bell hooks
Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope. – bell hooks
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. – bell hooks
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
I can be standing in Barneys with my coat and purse and my selections, and some white woman will say, ‘Can you get this in my size?’ What she sees is a black woman, and her service button goes off. – bell hooks
The ethic of liberal individualism has so deeply permeated the psyches of blacks… of all classes that we have little support for a political ethic of communalism that promotes the sharing of resources. – bell hooks
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. – bell hooks
My idea of a delicious time is to read a book that is wonderful. But the ruling passion of my life is being a seeker after truth and the divine. – bell hooks
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. – bell hooks
If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them. – bell hooks
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. – bell hooks
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. – bell hooks
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. – bell hooks
I think the Women’s movement has had a major impact on everybody’s lives in our nation and in the world as a whole. – bell hooks
These days I wonder more and more why people are pessimistic when American history actually supports optimism. – bell hooks
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!’ – bell hooks
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
The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic. – bell hooks
We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they’re beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved. – bell hooks
Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal. – bell hooks
I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love. – bell hooks
I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance. – bell hooks
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. – bell hooks
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
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. – bell hooks
