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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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Exlpore more Social Issues quotes
"Well, the big elephant in the whole system is the baby boomer generation that marches through like a herd of elephants. And we begin to retire in 2008."
"Prostitution, although hounded, imprisoned, and chained, is nevertheless the greatest triumph of Puritanism."
"The man who has his millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then raise his voice against the poor devil who wants ten cents more a day."
"In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state."
"One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing."
"Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony."
"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."
"Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity."
"Cities may now bulldoze private citizens' homes, farms and small businesses to make way for shopping malls or other developments."
"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']"
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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