Quotes from bell hooks

Compassion opens the way for individuals to feel empathy for others without judgment.

All too often in our society, it is assumed that one can know all there is to know about black people by merely hearing the life story and opinions of one black person.

Judging others increases our alienation. When we judge we are less able to forgive. The absence of forgiveness keeps us mired in shame.

Since masses of young females know little about feminism and many falsely assume that sexism is no longer the problem, feminist education for critical consciousness must be continuous.

To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others. Creating a false self to mask fears and insecurities has become so common that many of us forget who are and what we feel underneath the pretense.

Living in the Kentucky hills was where I first learned the importance of being wild.

While careers and making money remain important agendas, they never take precedence over valuing and nurturing human life and well-being.

Without conscious forgiveness there can be no genuine reconciliation. Making amends both to ourselves and to others is the gift compassion and forgiveness offers us. It is a process of emptying out wherein we let go all the waste so that there is a clear place within where we can see the other as ourself.

We continue to put in place the anti-sexist thinking and practice which affirms the reality that females can achieve self-actualization and success without dominating one another.

So frequently in the introductions to these works, authors would state that comprehensive studies of the social status of black women were needed but were yet to be written. I often wondered why no one was interested in writing such books.

When greedy consumption is the order of the day, dehumanization becomes acceptable. Then, treating people like objects is not only acceptable but is required behavior.

Most of us prefer to have a partner who is lacking than no partner at all. What becomes apparent is that we may be more interested in finding a partner than in knowing love.

When we choose to love we choose to move against fear--against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect-to find ourselves in the other.

Kindlon and Thompson carefully depoliticize their language. Their use of the word "tradition" belies the reality that the patriarchal culture which has socialized almost everyone in our nation to dismiss the emotional life of boys is an entrenched social and political system.

All too frequently in the women's movement it was assumed one could be free of sexist thinking by simply adopting the appropriate feminist rhetoric; it was further assumed that identifying oneself as oppressed freed one from being an oppressor.

LOVE REDEEMS. DESPITE all the lovelessness that surrounds us, nothing has been able to block our longing for love, the intensity of our yearning. The understanding that love redeems appears to be a resilient aspect of the heart's knowledge. The healing power of redemptive love lures us and calls us toward the possibility of healing.

Maybe, then, my lesbianism is no more than your manless self-reliance turned into itself.

I was in my mid-twenties when I first learned to understand love as the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

Like all great mysteries, we are all mysteriously called to love no matter the conditions of our lives, the degree of our depravity or despair. The persistence of this call gives us reason to hope.

Feminist movement created a revolution when it demanded respect for women's academic work, recognition of that work past and present, and an end to gender biases in curriculum and pedagogy.

Of course the truth of men's lives is that patriarchal sexuality has not satisfied. It has fueled the compulsive need to be more sexual, to be more violent in the hopes that there is a way to be more satisfied.

Many men, especially, often turn away from true love and choose relationships in which they can be emotionally withholding when they feel like it but still receive love from someone else. Ultimately, they choose power over love.

However feminist women in the West are still struggling to decolonize feminist thinking and practice so that these issues can be addressed in a manner that does not reinscribe Western imperialism.

Usually, fundamentalists, be they Christian, Muslim, or any faith, shape and interpret religious thought to make it conform to and legitimize a conservative status quo. Fundamentalist thinkers use religion to justify supporting imperialism, militarism, sexism, racism, homophobia. They deny the message of love that is at the heart of every major religious tradition.