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Being oppressed means the absence of choices

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
Absence
Choices
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Oppressed

More quotes by Bell Hooks

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Often girls feel deeply cared about as small children but then find as we develop willpower and independent thought that the world stops affirming us, that we are seen as unlovable.
Bell Hooks
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I have been contemplating the place and meaning of love in our lives and culture for years. When a subject attracts my intellectual and emotional imagination, I am long to observe it from all angles, to know it inside and out.
Bell Hooks
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Time and time again when I talk to individuals about approaching love with will and intentionality, I hear the fear expressed that this will bring an end to romance. This is simply not so. Approaching romantic love from foundation of care, knowledge, and respect actually intensifies romance
Bell Hooks
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If we move away from either/or thinking, and if we think, okay, every day of my life that I walk out of my house I am a combination of race, gender, class, sexual preference and religion or what have you, what gets foregrounded?
Bell Hooks
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I'm such a girl for the living room. I really like to stay in my nest and not move. I travel in my mind, and that that's a rigorous state of journeying for me. My body isn't that interested in moving from place to place.
Bell Hooks
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Reviewing the literature on love I noticed how few writers, male or female, talk about the impact of patriarchy, the way in which male domination of women and children stands in the ways of love.
Bell Hooks
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The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women's studies classes and said, Black women have always worked.
Bell Hooks
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I'm lucky. I think it's good that I have a body of work that addresses different things in different ways.
Bell Hooks
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Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.
Bell Hooks
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A central theme of all about love is that from childhood into adulthood we are often taught misguided and false assumptions about the nature of love. Perhaps the most common false assumption about love is that love means we will not be challenged or changed.
Bell Hooks
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My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.
Bell Hooks
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. . . no Black woman can become an intellectual without decolonizing her mind.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self.
Bell Hooks
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I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions - a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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Part of why I have started writing about love is feeling that our culture is forgetting what Martin Luther King taught. We name more and more streets and schools after him but that's almost irrelevant, because what is to be remembered is that strength to love.
Bell Hooks
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Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.
Bell Hooks
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The greater our commitment, the more likely our love will last.
Bell Hooks
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This rule of silence is upheld when the culture refuses everyone easy access even to the word “patriarchy.” Most children do not learn what to call this system of institutionaliz ed gender roles, so rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence promotes denial. And how can we organize to challenge and change a system that cannot be named?
Bell Hooks