Feminist, writer, and educator bell hooks (she prefers the lower case spelling) is a social critic concerned with issues of sexism and racism.

Selected bell hooks Quotations

• If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.

• If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldnt start with race; I wouldnt start with blackness; I wouldnt start with gender; I wouldnt start with feminism.

I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that Im a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love.

• Love is an action, never simply a feeling.

• Justice demands integrity. Its to have a moral universe - not only know what is right or wrong but to put things in perspective, weigh things. Justice is different from violence and retribution; it requires complex accounting.

• I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer...education as the practice of freedom.... education that connects the will to know with the will to become. Learning is a place where paradise can be created.

• If I do not speak in a language that can be understood there is little chance for a dialogue.

• Feminist education -- the feminist classroom -- is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university.

• Given the way universities work to reinforce and perpetuate the status quo, the way knowledge is offered as commodity, Womens Studies can easily become the place where revolutionary feminist thought and feminist activism are submerged or made secondary to the goals of academic