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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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There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it's the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.
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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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To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.
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When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.
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My focus has always been on the work - that work being critical thinking and writing. I am always doing that. That's where I am, wherever I am. Critical thinking and writing as my heartbeat.
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If we move away from either/or thinking, and if we think, okay, every day of my life that I walk out of my house I am a combination of race, gender, class, sexual preference and religion or what have you, what gets foregrounded?
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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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Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.
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Love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.
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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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What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.
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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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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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What's really sad is that so many young women between the ages of 16 and 25 are ignorant and they already believe that women get the same pay as men. They don't even really understand that equality hasn't happened with the pay force.
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While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weakens and damages connection. Lerner points out that we do not usually know the emotional costs of keeping a secret until the truth is disclosed. Usually, secrecy involves lying. And lying is always the setting for potential betrayal and violation of trust.
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To me, a woman can't be a feminist just because she is a woman. She is a feminist because she begins to divest herself of sexist ways of thinking and revolutionizes her consciousness.
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We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.
Bell Hooks