Quote collection
379 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You have to trust that if you are calling my name in a way that is offensive to me, I'm going to share it with you. But you also have to know what your feelings are behind calling me "bell.""
"I do get a little pissed at people who write me and want me to do things, and spell my name wrong."
"When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late 60's and early 70's, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: let's talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less. It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it. Many of us took the names of our female ancestors - bell hooks is my maternal great grandmother - to honor them and debunk the notion that we were these unique, exceptional women. We wanted to say, actually, we were the products of the women who'd gone before us."
"I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal, in ways that blind us to more important issues of life. I just think if we could take all the obsession with the personal (inaudible), and personal judgment and have people be concerned about the environment, what a different world we would live in."
"I think it's crazy for us to think that people don't understand what's being foregrounded in their lives at a given point in time."
"Right now, for many Americans, class is being foregrounded like never before because of the economic situation. It doesn't mean that race doesn't matter, or gender doesn't matter, but it means that right now in many people's lives, in the lives of my own family members, people are losing jobs, insurance."
"Sadly, anarchy has gotten such a bad name. We don't really see much evidence of it because people associate it with reckless abandon."
"Wars make people rich - and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people's lives away from them."
"I think we have to talk about educating the people for critical consciousness about what anarchy is."
"We know that so much of the war that is happening is the attempt of one group to snatch the resources of another group."
"Even when people capitalize my name, I don't freak out, even though that would not be my choice."
"I think we have to choose, what are the issues that really matter? We have to trust that."
"I think part of Western metaphysical dualism is, we're always being asked to choose one over the other."
"The greater our commitment, the more likely our love will last."
"Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it's not unfamiliar to you. It's always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life."
"The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech."
"Let's face it, war in its essence is another form of capitalism."
"Contrary to what some folks would have us believe, it is not tragic, even if undesirable, for a person to leave a liberal arts education not having read major works from this canon. Their lives are not ending. And the exciting dimension of knowledge is that we can learn a work without formally studying it. If a student graduates without reading Shakespeare and then reads or studies this work later, it does not delegitimize whatever formal course of study that was completed."
"None of us, irrespective of our sexual preference and/or practice, imagine that we can have an intimate relationship with a partner and always have seamless harmony. Indeed, most of us assume that once the “honeymoon” period is over differences will emerge and conflicts will happen. Positively, we also assume that we will be “safe“ in those moments; that even if voices are raised and emotions expressed are intense, there will not be and should not be any abuse or any reason to be unsafe, and that the will to connect and communicate will prevail."
"If anything I think postmodernism has the least impact on my work."