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The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
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More quotes by Bell Hooks

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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.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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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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My idea of a delicious time is to read a book that is wonderful. But the ruling passion of my life is being a seeker after truth and the divine.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.
Bell Hooks
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Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us.
Bell Hooks
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... we need to interrogate reverence, for idolization can be another way one is objectified and not really taken seriously.
Bell Hooks
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Even when people capitalize my name, I don't freak out, even though that would not be my choice.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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The greater our commitment, the more likely our love will last.
Bell Hooks
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We know that so much of the war that is happening is the attempt of one group to snatch the resources of another group.
Bell Hooks
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The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
Bell Hooks
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Justice is possible without equality, I believe, because of compassion and understanding. If I have compassion, then if I have more than you, which is unequal, I will still do the just thing by you.
Bell Hooks
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I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this “In order to love you, I must make you something else”. That’s what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you.
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.
Bell Hooks