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"Fame is fun, money is useful, celebrity can be exciting, but finally life is about optimal well-being and how we achieve that in dominator culture, in a greedy culture, in a culture that uses so much of the world's resources. How do men and women, boys and girls, live lives of compassion, justice and love? And I think that's the visionary challenge for feminism and all other progressive movements for social change."
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"It's a story of little girls who are pressed into working in sweat shops in games, who spend all day doing repetitive grinding tasks like making shirts, which are then converted into gold and sold on eBay."

"It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel, glass, and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall. It's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here."

"In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state."

"The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand."

"Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness."

"Between shortage and absolute poverty an ocean of shades and gradations do emerge on the scale of deficiency. Be that as it may, each stage must find a mode to leave a door ajar for the sun to peer in and human warmth to radiate. [' Homeless down in the corner']"

"Prostitution, although hounded, imprisoned, and chained, is nevertheless the greatest triumph of Puritanism."

"Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity."

"Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation."

"One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing."
Explore more quotes by bell hooks

"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?"

"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."

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

"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."

"I'm such a girl for the living room. I really like to stay in my nest and not move. I travel in my mind, and that that's a rigorous state of journeying for me. My body isn't that interested in moving from place to place."

"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 feel like there is always something trying to pull us back into sleep, that there is this sort of seductive quality in all the hedonistic pleasures that pull on us."

"Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, know that when we let our light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to other bearers of light. We are not alone."

"We must dare to face the way in which patriarchal thinking blinds everyone so that we cannot see that the emotional lives of boys cannot be fully honored as long as notions of patriarchal masculinity prevail. We cannot teach boys that "real men" either do not feel or do not express feelings, then expect boys to feel comfortable getting in touch with their feelings."

"I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health."
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