Zitat des Tages von bell hooks:
To live fixated on the future is to engage in psychological denial. It is a form of psychic violence that prepares us to accept the violence needed to ensure the maintenance of imperialist, future-oriented society.
I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.
A major part of love is commitment. If we are committed to someone, if I'm committed to loving you, then it's not possible for me to 'fall out of love.'
I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love.
What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.
These days I wonder more and more why people are pessimistic when American history actually supports optimism.
Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.
Live simply so that others may simply live.
The people I love, I'm committed to loving for the rest of my life.
There is a lushness to how my mind works.
We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they're beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved.
For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?
Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things.
Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.
I get so tired of people acting like, you know, black men and women never help each other, never support each other.
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.
I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that's becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism.
Class is more than money. Class is also about knowledge.
I think I was always obsessed with esthetics.
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.
In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love.
Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?
You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change.
No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.
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.
The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.
It's in the act of having to do things that you don't want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.
I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.
I've written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.
I think life experiences are different for people who know what they want as children.
Using pseudonyms was such a part of the early feminist movement. We didn't want to have this star system. We wanted attention on the ideas, not the persona of the writer.
I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words.
I feel that my environment reflects my belief in the grace and art and elegance of living simply.
Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.
But love is really more of an interactive process. It's about what we do not just what we feel. It's a verb, not a noun.
