bell hooks

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.

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

I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words.

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.

Live simply so that others may simply live.

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.

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

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.

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.

I feel that my environment reflects my belief in the grace and art and elegance of living simply.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think life experiences are different for people who know what they want as children.

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.'

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 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!'

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.

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.

Whenever women struggle with breast cancer and face better care than ever, that's feminism.

These days I wonder more and more why people are pessimistic when American history actually supports optimism.

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.

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.

I think I was always obsessed with esthetics.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

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.

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.

I don't think you can hate anything that you know intimately. There is no fine line separating love from hate because there's a deep chasm separating love from hate.

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.

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 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.

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.

Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.

Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal.

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