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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
States
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Library
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..Critically intervene in a way that challenges and changes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.
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I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life) to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair.
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I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.
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Giving generously in romantic relationships, and in all other bonds, means recognizing when the other person needs our attention. Attention is an important resource.
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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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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.
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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.
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Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.
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Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.
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We all may have prejudices, but we're not all part of a system that reinforces, reinvents and reaffirms itself every day of our lives, systemically.
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..Acts of appropriation are part of the process by which we make ourselves. Appropriating - taking something for one’s own use - need not be synonymous with exploitation. This is especially true of cultural appropriation. The “use” one makes of what is appropriated is the crucial factor.
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As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing.
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Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.
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For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.
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Most of us find it difficult to accept a definition of love that says we are never loved in a context where there is abuse.
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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.
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