Quotes from bell hooks

Sexism has never rendered women powerless. It has either suppressed their strength or exploited it.

I can be standing in Barneys with my coat and purse and my selections, and some white woman will say, 'Can you get this in my size?' What she sees is a black woman, and her service button goes off.

The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true.

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?

Feminism as a political movement has to specifically address the needs of men in their struggle to revolutionize their consciousness.

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.

I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health.

Since men are not equals in white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal class structure, which men do women want to be equal to?

I think I was always obsessed with esthetics.

Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal.

Most of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self-loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our well-being.

As more people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work harder to divide and conquer.

Within a capitalist consumer society, the cult of personality has the power to subsume ideas, to make the person, the personality into the product and not the work itself.

One of the things I find most exciting is talking with people who are working with my work. Who are using it in some way with their life to address everyday politics of meaning.

All the work I do is built on a foundation of loving-kindness. Love illuminates matters.

[O]ne of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.

Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits.

I'm lucky. I think it's good that I have a body of work that addresses different things in different ways.

If anything I think postmodernism has the least impact on my work.

What's so amazing about this historical moment is that it is bringing class to the fore and we have to think about the nature of work and hierarchy.

My focus has always been on the work - that work being critical thinking and writing. I am always doing that. That's where I am, wherever I am. Critical thinking and writing as my heartbeat.

My work is mostly influenced by the concrete circumstances of our daily lives.

To the extent that we live in a postmodern world and it shapes the concrete circumstances of our daily lives, I would say postmodernism affects my work or influences my work.

I feel that my environment reflects my belief in the grace and art and elegance of living simply.