bell hooks

“When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.”

“There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.”

“While it is positive for young black males and females to learn discipline and self-responsibility, those attitudes, values, and habits of being can be taught with pedagogical strategies tha...”

“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.”

“Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are access...”

“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their...”

“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 extr...”

“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 patri...”

“These days I wonder more and more why people are pessimistic when American history actually supports optimism.”

“An often-repeated assertion in the body of film criticism I have written is the assertion that movies do not just mirror the culture of any given time; they also create it.”

“All over the world, young males and females, schooled in the art of patriarchal thinking, are building an identity on a foundation that sees the will to do violence as the essential way to a...”

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

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.”

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

“Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.”

“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 go...”

“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.”

“The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.”

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

“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 t...”