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We all may have prejudices, but we're not all part of a system that reinforces, reinvents and reaffirms itself every day of our lives, systemically.

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
Prejudices
Prejudice
System
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May
Reinvents
Every
Reaffirms
Reinforces

More quotes by Bell Hooks

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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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... we need to interrogate reverence, for idolization can be another way one is objectified and not really taken seriously.
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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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Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.
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Feminist education — the feminist classroom — is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university.
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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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To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.
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Within a capitalist consumer society, the cult of personality has the power to subsume ideas, to make the person, the personality into the product and not the work itself.
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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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Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.
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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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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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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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It is poetry that changes everything.
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Like many white liberals, Ken sees the whiteness of his social life as more an accident of circumstance than a choice. He would welcome greater diversity in the neighbourhood. However, he does not consciously do enough work either in his social life or in the larger community to make that diversity possible.
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If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice.
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The greater our commitment, the more likely our love will last.
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The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.
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Of all the definitions of love that abound in our universe, a special favorite of mine is... “the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”
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Without justice there can be no love.
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