Bell Hooks Quotes

The 'futures' and 'careers' for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers' paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant.

Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!

What did you learn in school that you still use today? Go ahead teachers, tell me. What? Fear, conformity, don't question authority.

Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.

I'm a father to four kids, so it bothers me that even though our children think big naturally, our society systematically trains them out of thinking that way.

… the third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

At the Harvard Business School, I really felt I had gained the ability to resolve difficult issues. But I also felt that I wasn't in the mainstream with my fellow students. During job-hunting season, for example, everybody shaved their beards for interviews. I thought, 'This is crazy.' So I grew a beard.

In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.

What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That's not science. You can get a parrot to do that.

I think some people like me because I'm different. I don't think like everybody else. People are so tied up in the worst parts of technology these days. They live a life pressing buttons. They don't use their imaginations.

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.

Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society…

I'm used to being told what to say, but not what to think... that's usually left up to me.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

I guess, just being in a group, I had never thought to question my individual artistry.

I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

The little boy went first day of school He got some crayons and started to draw He put colors all over the paper For colors was what he saw And the teacher said.. "What you doin' young man?" "I'm paintin' flowers" he said She said... "It's not the time for art young man And anyway flowers are green and red There's a time for everything young man And a way it should be done You've got to show concern for everyone else For you're not the only one.

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.

Almost everyone today is brain-damaged by our education which is designed to produce docile automatons.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.