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One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library.

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
Subversive
Library
Institutions
Public
United
States

More quotes by Bell Hooks

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I think inequality is in our minds. I think this is what we learn through practice... The bridge of illusion must be shattered in order for a real bridge to be constructed. One of the things we learn is that inequality is an illusion.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem.
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as females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love most of us were and are slaves of longing-- yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves
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Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively.
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I gather together the dreams, fantasies, experiences that preoccupied me as a girl, that stay with me and appear and reappear in different shapes and forms in all my work. Without telling everything that happened, they document all that remains most vivid.
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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.
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Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.
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. . .there is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions, stress, and pain of constant exploitation and oppression.
Bell Hooks
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When we are more energized by the practice of blaming than we are by efforts to create transformation, we not only cannot find relief from suffering, we are creating the conditions that help keep us stuck in the status quo
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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Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
Bell Hooks
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Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves oppressed, no one would have taken them seriously.
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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feminism is for everybody
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Without justice there can be no love.
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Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.
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