Quotes from bell hooks

For too long the term domestic violence has been used as a soft term which suggests it emerges in an intimate context that is private and somehow less threatening, less brutal, than the violence that takes place outside the home. This is not so, since more women are beaten and murdered in the home than on the outside.

The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.

When men lie to women, presenting a false self, the terrible price they pay to maintain power over us is the loss of their capacity to give and receive love.

Overall women in our society are forgetting the value and power of sisterhood. Renewed feminist movement must once again raise the banner high to proclaim anew Sistehood is powerful.

We need to theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the place of beauty is in our lives when we lack material privilege and even basic resources for living, the meaning and significance of luxury, and the politics of envy.

To be oppressed means to be deprived of your ability to choose.

see first-hand the ways that democratic education is being undermined as the interests of big business and corporate capitalism encourage students to see education solely as a means to achieve material success. Such thinking makes acquiring information more important than gaining knowledge or learning how to think critically.

Since our society continues to be primarily a Christian culture masses of people continue to believe that god has ordained that women be subordinate to men in the domestic household.

True love is a different story. When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other's core identity. Embarking on such a relationship is frightening precisely because we feel there is no place to hide. We are known. All the ecstasy that we feel emerges as this love nurtures us and challenges us to grow and transform.

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

When we love children, we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights - that we respect and uphold their rights.

Love allows us to confront these negative realities in a manner that is life-affirming and life enhancing.

Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience.

Indeed, all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic.

Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of sameness even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think.

Profound changes in the way we think and act must take place if we are to create a loving culture.

Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.

Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture.

This fear of maleness that they inspire estranges men from every female in their lives to greater or lesser degrees, and men feel the loss. Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust.

When I speak of the spiritual, I refer to the recognition within everyone that there is a place of mystery in our lives where forces that are beyond human desire or will alter circumstances and/or guide and direct us. I call these forces divine spirit. When we choose to lead a spirit-filled life, we recognize and celebrate the presence of transcendent spirits.

think about the contradictions and complexities that beset people.

To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism.

The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want to be.

Failure to examine the victimization of men keeps us from understanding maleness, from uncovering the space of connection that might lead more men to seek feminist transformation.