773 Quotes by Bell Hooks

True love is a different story. When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other’s core identity. Embarking on such a relationship is frightening precisely because we feel there is no place to hide. We are known. All the ecstasy that we feel emerges as this love nurtures us and challenges us to grow and transform.

When we love children, we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights – that we respect and uphold their rights.

We knew that there could no real sisterhood between white women and women of color if white women were not able to divest of white supremacy, if feminist movement were not fundamentally anti-racist.

I’m so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.

Sexist discrimination has prevented white women from assuming the dominant role in the perpetuation of white racial imperialism, but it has not prevented white women from absorbing, supporting, and advocating racist ideology or acting individually as racist oppressors in various spheres of American life.

For black men of all ages it is more acceptable to express rage than to give voice to emotional needs.

Love and abuse cannot co-exist.

Boys learn to cover up grief with anger; the more troubled the boy, the more intense the mask of indifference. Shutting down emotionally is the best defense when the longing for connection must be denied.

What’s really sad is that so many young women between the ages of 16 and 25 are ignorant and they already believe that women get the same pay as men. They don’t even really understand that equality hasn’t happened with the pay force.