773 Quotes by Bell Hooks

Feminism has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually – women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority.

When women internalized the idea that describing their own woe was synonymous with developing a critical political consciousness, the progress of the feminist movement was stalled.

Given the changing realities of class in our nation, widening gaps between the rich and poor, and the continued feminization of poverty, we desperately need a mass-based radical feminist movement that can build on the strength of the past, including the positive gains generated by reforms, while offering meaningful interrogation of existing feminist theory that was simply wrongminded while offering us new strategies.

I learned then that it is more fulfilling to live one’s life within a circle of love, interacting with loved ones to whole we are committed.

I’m tired of the naked, raped, beaten black woman body. I want to see an image of black femaleness that alters our universe in some way.

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

To me, a woman can’t be a feminist just because she is a woman. She is a feminist because she begins to divest herself of sexist ways of thinking and revolutionizes her consciousness.

In popular culture love is always the stuff of fantasy. Maybe this is why men have done most of the theorizing about love. Fantasy has primarily been their domain, both in the sphere of cultural production and in everyday life. Male fantasy is seen as something that can create reality, whereas female fantasy is regarded as pure escape.

For many men the moment of violent connection may be the only intimacy, the only attainable closeness, the only space where the agony is released.