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Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
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Wars make people rich - and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people's lives away from them.
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Without justice there can be no love.
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The challenge these days, is to be somewhere, to belong to some particular place, invest oneself in it, draw strength and courage from it, to dwell in a community.
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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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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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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.
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I think this is often misunderstood in the West, where people feel that there can be no justice unless everything is the same. This is part of why I feel we have to relearn how we think about love, because we think about love so much in terms of the self.
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I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that's becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism.
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The world would be a paradise of peace and justice if global citizens shared a common definition of love which would guide our thoughts and action.
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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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The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.
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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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To the extent that we live in a postmodern world and it shapes the concrete circumstances of our daily lives, I would say postmodernism affects my work or influences my work.
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