Bell Hooks Quotes

A reformer knows neither how to do nor to undo.

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.

The most revolutionary ideas are not sellable, but only mind-changing.

To rest satisfied with existing evils, as if we could do nothing, is not obedience; but neither is it obedience to imitate the actions of the apostles.

If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the Revolution.

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end in superstitions.

We want traditional change—not transformational change.

Radicals have value, at least; they can move the center.

Remember: you cannot build a better mouse trap by fixing the old one - NewCo demands active ownership, and that activity is not the sum of doing multiple jobs but, instead, the sum of implementing paradigm-shifting changes that create new industries and solutions.

Change the sound. Make people rethink what they're doing. That's what I really wanna do.

What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?

Until we start thinking in terms of revolution instead of compromise the Church will continue to pat itself on the back with token steps of renewal.

There is only one revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, all political systems: Revolution by design and invention.

We must stop being polite and behaved and find new inventive tactics to shift the paradigm. We are the majority.

The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.

President Obama is a man who had certain advantages because of the civil rights movement. He had the opportunity to go to some of the best schools in this country - schools that train you how to run the political paradigm, not challenge it. The leaders of the Black Power Movement were challenging that paradigm.

It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.

We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.

The challenge I set before anyone who condemns private-sector business is this: If you are a socially conscious person, why don't you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?

Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next.

The most powerful thing in the world is an idea.

The history of human growth is at the same time the history of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn, and the brighter dawn has always been considered illegal, outside of the law.

Ethical veganism results in a profound revolution within the individual; a complete rejection of the paradigm of oppression and violence that she has been taught from childhood to accept as the natural order. It changes her life and the lives of those with whom she shares this vision of nonviolence. Ethical veganism is anything but passive; on the contrary, it is the active refusal to cooperate with injustice