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Being oppressed means the absence of choices

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
Oppressed
Absence
Choices
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Mean

More quotes by Bell Hooks

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I feel sad that we have allowed these knee-jerk feminists who want to act like it's a struggle against men...but again that's the least politically developed strand of feminism.
Bell Hooks
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Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.
Bell Hooks
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. . . no Black woman can become an intellectual without decolonizing her mind.
Bell Hooks
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When I write provocative social and cultural criticism that causes readers to stretch their minds, to think beyond set paradigms, I think of that work as love in action. While it may challenge, disturb and at times even frighten or enrage readers, love is always the place where I begin and end.
Bell Hooks
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One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there.
Bell Hooks
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Justice demands integrity. It’s to have a moral universe — not only know what is right or wrong but to put things in perspective, weigh things. Justice is different from violence and retribution it requires complex accounting.
Bell Hooks
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I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this “In order to love you, I must make you something else”. That’s what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you.
Bell Hooks
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I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal, in ways that blind us to more important issues of life. I just think if we could take all the obsession with the personal (inaudible), and personal judgment and have people be concerned about the environment, what a different world we would live in.
Bell Hooks
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The greater our commitment, the more likely our love will last.
Bell Hooks
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When we concentrate on photography, we make it possible to see the walls of photographs in black homes as a critical intervention, a disruption of white control over black images.
Bell Hooks
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We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.
Bell Hooks
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A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.
Bell Hooks
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But love is really more of an interactive process. It's about what we do not just what we feel. It's a verb, not a noun.
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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Professors rarely speak of the place of eros or the erotic in our classrooms. Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is present, and not the body.
Bell Hooks
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I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health.
Bell Hooks
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Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction.
Bell Hooks
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All the work I do is built on a foundation of loving-kindness. Love illuminates matters.
Bell Hooks
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Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into that sea of despair.
Bell Hooks
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I often find it easier to be teaching or giving to others, and often struggle with the place of my own pleasure and joy.
Bell Hooks