Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm lucky. I think it's good that I have a body of work that addresses different things in different ways.
Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love.
Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into that sea of despair.
Lying has become so much the accepted norm that people lie even when it would be simpler to tell the truth.
The working-class black Southern Christian culture I come from still nurtures me, and I mean directly, daily.
We don't really live in a culture that loves boys or loves children, and we don't encourage boys to be whole.
Because we have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice.
These days I wonder more and more why people are pessimistic when American history actually supports optimism.
When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.
Wars make people rich - and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people's lives away from them.
The world demands that you work for it, make families, provide, take no time to listen to your own heart beating.
You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change.
Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.
To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.
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 think the Women's movement has had a major impact on everybody's lives in our nation and in the world as a whole.
Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.
Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.
There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.
I get so tired of people acting like, you know, black men and women never help each other, never support each other.
I've written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.
As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.
Love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.
We know that so much of the war that is happening is the attempt of one group to snatch the resources of another group.
You must have courage to love, you have to have a profound will to do what is right to love, and it does not come easy.
It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.
I often find it easier to be teaching or giving to others, and often struggle with the place of my own pleasure and joy.
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.
You are not going to destroy this imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy by creating your own version of it.
Our hearts connect with lots of folks in a lifetime but most of us will go to our graves with no experience of true love.
The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.
Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is.
Certainly we can end racism with love. We can demand that the federal government change its emphasis on racial distinction.
Most of us find it difficult to accept a definition of love that says we are never loved in a context where there is abuse.
Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.
Few people who are hit once by someone they love respond in the way they might to a singular physical assault by a stranger.
... we need to interrogate "reverence," for idolization can be another way one is objectified and not really taken seriously.
Only grown-ups think that the things children say come out of nowhere. We know they come from the deepest parts of ourselves.
The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.
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.
We don't hear much from revolutionary feminists who are white because they're not serving the bourgeois agenda of the status quo.
The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.
[O]ne of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.
I think it's crazy for us to think that people don't understand what's being foregrounded in their lives at a given point in time.
Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us.
Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.
Sadly, anarchy has gotten such a bad name. We don't really see much evidence of it because people associate it with reckless abandon.
If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.
Feminism as a political movement has to specifically address the needs of men in their struggle to revolutionize their consciousness.
Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we value and as a consequence how we know what we know as well as how we use what we know.