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"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, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community."
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"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."

"Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities " but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world."

"If a media is not criticizing the government, then that media is not a media but just a clown of the government!"

"William Cowper said that God made the country, and man made the town. If it was the opposite, there would be no country; because town can be created from the country but the country cannot be created from the town!"

"Bureaucracy is a huge beast; deeply rooted, it exists even among artists; it's an almost losing battle against it."

"Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him."

"Saying someone is religious is heard in most of America as a compliment, a reassuring affirmation that someone will be moral, ethical, and after a few glasses of wine, a freak in the bedroom."

"Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations..."

"More than anything else, we need in this society the opportunity for people to tell us what they think without being told that they're either dumb, or stupid, or uninformed."
Explore more quotes by bell hooks

"I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love."

"I learned that we may meet a true love and that our lives may be transformed by such an encounter even when it does not lead to sexual pleasure, committed bonding, or even sustained contact. The myth of true love-that fairy-tale vision of two souls who meet, join, and live happily ever thereafter-is the stuff of childhood fantasy. Yet many of us, female and male, carry these fantasies into adulthood and are unable to cope with the reality of what it means to either have an intense life-altering connection that will not lead to an ongoing relationship or to be in a relationship. True love does not always lead to happily ever after, and even when it does sustaining love still takes work."

"Most gay men are as sexist in their thinking as are heterosexuals. Their patriarchal thinking leads them to construct paradigms of desirable sexual behaviour that is similar to that of patriarchal straight men."

"We keep coming back to the question of representation because identity is always about representation. People forget that when they wanted white women to get into the workforce because of the world war, what did they start doing? They started having a lot of commercials, a lot of movies, a lot of things that were redoing the female image, saying, "Hey, you can work for the war, but you can still be feminine. So what we see is that the mass media, film, TV, all of these things, are powerful vehicles for maintaining the kinds of systems of domination we live under, imperialism, racism, sexism etc. Often there's a denial of this and art is presented as politically neutral, as though it is not shaped by a reality of domination."

"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."

"An often-repeated assertion in the body of film criticism I have written is the assertion that movies do not just mirror the culture of any given time they also create it."

"With reciprocity all things do not need to be equal in order for acceptance and mutuality to thrive. If equality is evoked as the only standard by which it is deemed acceptable for people to meet across boundaries and create community, then there is little hope. Fortunately, mutuality is a more constructive and positive foundation for the building of ties that allow for differences in status, position, power, and privilege whether determined by race, class, sexuality, religion, or nationality."

"The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech."
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