Quotes from bell hooks

To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.

Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is.

Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.

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.

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.

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

I love my family, even as I critique their dysfunctionalities.

The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our 'natural' condition.

It really fascinates me what white people are allowed to write about.

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.

Spirituality and spiritual life give us the strength to love.

I think stress is anything going on in our lives that impinges on our capacity to have optimum well being.

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

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

All my life I have longed to have a loving relationship that would last a lifetime.

...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.

The true teacher is within us. A good teacher is someone who can help you to go back and touch the true teacher within, because you already have the insight within you.

. . .there is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions, stress, and pain of constant exploitation and oppression.

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.

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

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.

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

Intersectionality allow us to focus on what is most important at a given point in time.