Quotes from bell hooks

And I was already on my way to being a true freak because I knew I would always choose to go where my blood beats, in any and all directions.

It is this dependency that became, and is, the breeding ground for abuses of power.

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.

Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.

Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, know that when we let our light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to other bearers of light. We are not alone.

While the patriarchal boys in hip-hop crew may talk about keeping it real, there has been no musical culture with black men at the forefront of its creation that has been steeped in the politics of fantasy and denial as the more popular strands of hip-hop.

When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth. It's not what you do but how you do it.

When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat

We learn to love men more because they will not love us. If they dared to love us, in patriarchal culture they would cease to be real "men.

consider New Age logic, which suggests that the poor have chosen to be poor, have chosen their suffering. Such thinking removes from all of us who are privileged the burden of accountability.

One of the most important social myths we must debunk if we are to become a more loving culture is the one that teaches parents that abuse and neglect can coexist with love. Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love.

The need for instant gratification is a component of greed.

The we evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.

Those who choose to walk on love's path are well served if they have a guide. That guide can enable us to overcome fear if we trust that they will not lead us astray or abandon us along the way.

It is far easier to talk about loss than it is to talk about love. It is easier to articulate the pain of love's absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives.

Folks from the backwoods were certain about two things: that every human soul needed to be free and that the responsibility of being free required one to be a person of integrity, a person who lived in such a way that there would always be congruency between what one thinks, says, and does.

No wonder then that male rage is often most directed at women in intimate relationships. Such relationships clearly trigger for many males the anger and rage they felt in childhood when their mothers did not protect them or ruthlessly severed emotional bonds in the name of patriarchy.

All backwoods folks were poor by material standards; they knew how to make do. They were not wanting to tame the wildness, in themselves or nature.

No other group in America has used black people as metaphors as extensively as white women involved in the women's movement.

We have power as consumers. We can exercise that power all the time by not choosing to invest time, energy or funds to support the production of mass media images that do not reflect life-enhancing values, that undermine a love ethic.

When men did most of the work women worked to make home a site of comfort and relaxation for males. Home was relaxing to women only when men and children were not present. When women in the home spend all their time attending to the needs of others, home is a workplace for her, not a site of relaxation, comfort, and pleasure.

I feel enormously blessed to be a successful black woman writer in this culture, but I have found my small fame, such as it is, to be very isolating... because I think that especially for black women, the more we rise from the bottom, the more we move and journey, the more we are the targets of the most brutal and vicious attacks.

move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical models of social change that emphasize collective as well as individual change.

Patriarchal hip-hop ushered in a world where black males could declare that they were "keeping it real" when what they were really doing was taking the dead patriarchal protest of the black power movement and rearticulating it in forms that, though entertaining, had for the most part no transformative power, no ability to intervene on the politics of domination, and turn the real lives of black men around.