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Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
Essentials
Despair
Climate
Struggle
Disillusionment
Hope
Promotes
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Overall
Political
Radical
Change
Essential

More quotes by Bell Hooks

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If you're in a domestic situation where the man is violent, patriarchy and male domination - even though you understand it intersectionally - you focus, you highlight that dimension of it, if that's what is needed to change the situation.
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Feminism as a political movement has to specifically address the needs of men in their struggle to revolutionize their consciousness.
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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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Hip-Hop is diverse. But the white, capitalist producers and distributors of Hip-Hop are most interested in the Hip-Hip that is misogynist, that is Black-hating, that is pugilistic, that is to say all about fighting and war and killing and gangsterism.
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Since we live in a society that promotes faddism and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change.
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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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Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.
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If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice.
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I think this is what people misunderstand about Martin Luther King saying to love your enemies. They think he was just using this silly little phrase, but what he meant was that as Black Americans we need to let our anger go, because holding on to it we hold ourselves down. We oppress ourselves by holding on to anger.
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The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom.
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Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power - not because they don't see it, but because they see it and they don't want it to exist.
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The intellectual tradition of the West is very individualistic. It's not community-based. The intellectual is often thought of as a person who is alone and cut off from the world. So I have had to practice being willing to leave the space of my study to be in community, to work in community, and to be changed by community.
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... feminist solidarity rooted in a commitment to progressive politics must include a space for rigorous critique, for dissent, orwe are doomed to reproduce in progressive communities the very forms of domination we seek to oppose.
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there is no politically neutral art.
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To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.
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I believe that it is impossible for two individuals not committed to their own and each other’s well being to sustain a healthy and enduring relationship.
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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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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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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.
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If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.
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