Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. Profoundly inspirational bell hooks quotes will encourage you to think a little deeper than you usually would and broaden your perspective.
If you’re searching for quotes by prominent activists that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of quotes by Coretta Scott King, best Dorothy Day quotes and greatest Elizabeth Cady Stanton quotes.
Famous Bell Hooks Quotes
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? bell hooks
Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. 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
Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love which is to transform us. Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling. 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
Women are often belittled for trying to resurrect these men and bring them back to life and to love. They are in a world that would be even more alienated and violent if caring women did not do the work of teaching men who have lost touch with themselves how to love again. This labor of love is futile only when the men in question refuse to awaken, refuse growth. At this point, it is a gesture of self love for women to break their commitment and move on. 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
All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way. 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
Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition. bell hooks
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. bell hooks
The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control. bell hooks
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. bell hooks
A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love, we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers the experience of knowing we always belong. 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
Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart. bell hooks
I love my family, even as I critique their dysfunctionalities. bell hooks
The light of love is always in us, no matter how cold the flame. It is always present, waiting for the spark to ignite, waiting for the heart to awaken and call us back to the first memory of being the life force inside a dark place waiting to be born waiting to see the light. bell hooks
Live simply so that others may simply live. bell hooks
If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle. 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
How different things might be if, rather than saying, I think I’m in love, we were saying I’ve connected with someone in a way that makes me think I’m on the way to knowing love. Or if instead of saying I am in love, we say I am loving or I will love. Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language. bell hooks
Blacks who lack a proper killing rage are merely victims. bell hooks
The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination. bell hooks
I think life experiences are different for people who know what they want as children. bell hooks
Radical militant feminist believes that women of color and Black women, in particular, have written the cutting edge theory and really were the individuals who exploded feminist theory into the directions that has made it more powerful. So I see us as the leaders not just of Black people and Black women in terms of feminism but in terms of the movement as a whole. 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
Feminism as a theoretical enterprise is approached differently by Black women depending on where we are. There are more reformist Black women who tend to use the phrase Black feminism. bell hooks
You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change. bell hooks
Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us. bell hooks
Whenever women struggle with breast cancer and face better care than ever, that’s feminism. bell hooks
Individual heterosexual women came to the movement from relationships where men were cruel, unkind, violent, unfaithful. Many of these men were radical thinkers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice. However, when it came to the issue of the gender they were as sexist as their conservative cohorts. bell hooks
I think I was always obsessed with esthetics. bell hooks
The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization. bell hooks
I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words. bell hooks
I still think it’s important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not. 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
Feminism is for everybody. bell hooks
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. bell hooks
Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. bell hooks
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. bell hooks
Feminist effort to end patriarchal domination should be of primary concern precisely because it insists on the eradication of exploitation and oppression in the family context and in all other intimate relationships. It is that political movement which most radically addresses the person the personal citing the need for the transformation of self, of relationships, so that we might be better able to act in a revolutionary manner, challenging and resisting domination, transforming the world outside the self. bell hooks
Life transforming ideas have always come to me through books. bell hooks
We live in a world with serious class complexes. It is one thing to be a college student with loan debts and another thing to be just dirt poor for your entire life. The challenge is to come up with more complex understandings of where we are, more global awareness of what connects Americans with what is happening with suffering and oppressed people all around the world. 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
We live in a world with serious class complexes. It is one thing to be a college student with loan debts and another thing to be just dirt poor for your entire life. The challenge is to come up with more complex understandings of where we are, more global awareness of what connects Americans with what is happening with suffering and oppressed people all around the world. bell hooks
The people I love, I’m committed to loving for the rest of my life. bell hooks
As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized. bell hooks
Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal. bell hooks
Hip Hop is diverse. But the white, capitalist producers and distributors of Hip Hop are most interested in the Hip Hip that is misogynist, that is Black hating, that is pugilistic, that is to say all about fighting and war and killing and gangsterism. bell hooks
Any society based on domination supports and condones violence. bell hooks
If Black women stand strong and our commitment is to ending domination I know that I’m supporting Black males, Black children male and female Black elderly because the bottom line is the struggle to end domination in all its forms. 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
Whether we’re talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it’s where the learning is. bell hooks
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. bell hooks
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. bell hooks
These days I wonder more and more why people are pessimistic when American history actually supports optimism. bell hooks
It’s really important to have life strategies and part of that is sort of knowing where you want to go so you can have a map that helps you to get there. And the traditional way tells us oh we get into school and someone else advises us, helps us, but that often does not work for African Americans female and male. Because what works for the dominant culture often does not work for us. 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
Sexism has never rendered women powerless. It has either suppressed their strength or exploited it. 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
Often in my lectures when I use the phrase imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. bell hooks
Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other. bell hooks
My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers, we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know. 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
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
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
Sadly, children’s passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only. 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
The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies. Living consciously is living with a core of healthy self esteem. You will face reality, you will not delude yourself. bell hooks
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. bell hooks
Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. bell hooks
The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech. bell hooks
If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love. bell hooks
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
The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood on that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. 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
If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self defining, her agency. 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
In an ideal world, we would all learn in childhood to love ourselves. We would grow, being secure in our worth and value, spreading love wherever we went, letting our light shine. If we did not learn self love in our youth, there is still hope. bell hooks
It really fascinates me what white people are allowed to write about. bell hooks
