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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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Bell Hooks
Suffering
Flats
Often
Plain
Live
Consistent
Without
Wanting
World
Difficulty
Cause
Struggle
Flat
Causes
Valleys

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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?
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If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice.
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To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.
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My work is mostly influenced by the concrete circumstances of our daily lives.
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I feel that I have many real students whom I have not met. Many are in cloisters and they never get out. Others are in prison. But in many cases they practice the teachings much better than those who meet me every day.
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Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.
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What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.
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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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The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.
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... we need to interrogate reverence, for idolization can be another way one is objectified and not really taken seriously.
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Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—“to stand outside”—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.
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...move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical models of social change that emphasize collective as well as individual change.
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One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library.
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Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.
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I don't have issues around how I'm identified.
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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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