Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe.

— Bell Hooks

Bell Hooks Quotes

I think one of the most wonderful books that Martin Luther King wrote was Strength to Love. I always liked it because of the word ‘strength,’ which counters the Western notion of love as easy. Instead, Martin Luther King said that you must have courage to love, that you have to have a profound will to do what is right to love, that it does not come easy.

— Bell Hooks

Most men are on quest for the ready-made perfect woman because they basically feel that problems in a relationship can’t be worked out. When the slightest thing goes wrong, it seems easier to bolt than talk.

— Bell Hooks

The presence of pain in our lives is not an indicator of dysfunction.

— Bell Hooks

So many of us have felt that we could win male love by showing we were willing to bear the pain, that we were willing to live our lives affirming that the maleness deemed truly manly because it withholds, withdraws, refuses is the maleness we desire. We learn to love men more because they will not love us. If they dared to love us, in patriarchal culture they would cease to be real “men.

— Bell Hooks

False notions of love teach us that it is the place where we will feel no pain, where we will be in a state of constant bliss. We have to expose the falseness of these beliefs to see and accept the reality that suffering and pain do not end when we begin to love.

— Bell Hooks

Trust is the heartbeat of genuine love. And we trust that the attention our partners give friends, or vice versa, does not take anything away from us – we are not diminished.

— Bell Hooks

Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.

— Bell Hooks

Death is among us. To see it always and only as a negative subject is to lose sight of its power to enhance every moment.

— Bell Hooks

Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love.

— Bell Hooks

Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.

— Bell Hooks

Feminism has been used as a psychological tool to make women think that work they might otherwise see as boring, tedious, and time consuming is liberating. For whether feminism exists or not, women must work.

— Bell Hooks

Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.

— Bell Hooks

The desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will – namely, both an intention and action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” – Fromm.

— Bell Hooks

When poetry stirs in my imagination it is almost always from an indirect place, where language is abstract, where the mood and energy is evocative of submerged emotional intelligence and experience.

— Bell Hooks

If you do not love yourself, you will be unable to love anyone else.

— Bell Hooks

Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.

— Bell Hooks

I would like heterosexual women to be as actively curious about how and why and when they became heterosexual as I have been about how and why and when I became a Lesbian.

— Bell Hooks

Every day, when I drink water or take a dish from the cupboard, I stand before this reminder that we yearn for love – that we seek it – even when we lack hope that it really can be found.

— Bell Hooks

Poems of lamentation allow the melancholic loss that never truly disappears to be given voice. Like a slow solemn musical refrain played again and again, they call us to remember and mourn, to know again that as we work for change our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.

— Bell Hooks

It is far too easy to stay stuck in simply describing, telling one’s story over and over again, which can be a way of holding on to grief about the past or holding on to a narrative that places blame on others.

— Bell Hooks
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