Bell Hooks Quotes

I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.

Violence is anything that denies human integrity, and leads to hopelessness and helplessness.

I think there's something very dark in the South African psyche. I think we live a lot of the time in a state of a very low-grade civil war; the levels of violence in South Africa are extremely high. In a way, the civil war that never happened is being played out in a covert way, so we live with a lot of very ugly things.

When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

I interviewed dozens and dozens of African women who had endured more hardship and trauma than most Westerners even read about, and they ploughed on. I often openly cried during interviews, unable to process this violence and hatred towards women I was witnessing.

Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.

I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.

I don't know if it matters what country you're from, size of the city you're from, urban or rural, there are people that are hurting each other everywhere.

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

Never mind a world that can't see past brutality.

The devadasis have a multilayered story, a story in which poverty, deprivation and injustice against women is central - but what has happened to them is absolutely an outcome of imperialism and the impact of British rule in India.

Drama lives on conflict. If you're trying to deal with social issues seriously, there's no way of avoiding violence, which is so present in society.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

Imperialism or globalization - I don't have to care what it's called to hate it.

The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.

I don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife.

I shall not lick the hand besmeared with the blood of my children, sisters, and brothers.

There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.

Flagrant injustice, cruelty and oppression…if left unchecked will so multiply that the whole of the native border tribes will be provoked into a battle of dangerous exasperation.

My mind revolts and my soul cannot support the weight of so much evil: theft, rape, pillage, deaths, and murders, fires and devastation; the virgin violated, the cry of the widow and the orphan; the father armed against his son and each one looking for his brother to kill him; of those who have migrated; of the thousands who have fled; of the bodies stretched out in the public streets; of the bones which cover the fields and of so much blood shed on Venezuela’s soil.

To look upon the massacre of our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, and if we speak we are called savages ….

Systematic recourse to violence put forward as the necessary path to liberation has to be condemned as a destructive illusion and one that opens the way to new forms of servitude. One must condemn with equal vigor violence exercised by the powerful against the poor, arbitrary action by the police, and any form of violence established as a system of government.

They tell us they want to civilize us. They lie. They want to kill us.