Quotes By 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.

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

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?

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

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 Black people need to take self-esteem seriously.

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

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

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.

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?

I think I was always obsessed with esthetics.