bell hooks

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.”

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting a stop to it.”

“The heart of justice is truth telling.”

“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, is what will bring us closer to freedom.”

“Marginality is not a site of deprivation, but rather a site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.”

“When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.”

“To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.”

“What we do is more important than what we say or what we say we believe.”

“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.”

“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”

“One of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.”

“Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”

“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.”

“When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.”

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.”

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible.”

“There can be no love without justice.”

“If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.”

“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.”

“Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma paralyzes.”