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Quote by Bell Hooks

“Confronting the endless desire that is at the heart of our individual overconsumption and global excess is the only intervention that can ward off the daily call to consume that bombards us on all sides.”

Quote by Bell Hooks

Book:Where We Stand: Class Matters
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Where We Stand: Class Matters

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Bell Hooks
Bell Hooks

Bell Hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, is an American author, scholar, and activist. Her work primarily focuses on issues of race, gender, and social justice, particularly on feminist and black feminist thought. Hooks' works include novels, poetry, academic writings, and autobiographies, and her writing style is beloved by readers for its profound social insight and desire for change. more

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“The last time the "best and brightest" got control of the country, they dragged it into a protracted, demoralizing war in Southeast Asia, from which the country has still not fully recovered. Yet Reich seems to believe that a new generation of Whiz Kids can do for the faltering American economy what Robert McNamara's generation failed to do for American diplomacy: to restore, through sheer brainpower, the world leadership briefly enjoyed by the United States after World War II and subsequently lost not, of course, through stupidity so much as through the very arrogance the "arrogance of power," as Senator William Fulbright used to call it to which the "best and brightest" are congenitally addicted. This arrogance should not be confused with the pride characteristic of aristocratic classes, which rests on the inheritance of an ancient lineage and on the obligation to defend its honor. Neither valor and chivalry nor the code of courtly, romantic love, with which these values are closely associated, has any place in the world view of the best and brightest. A meritocracy has no more use for chivalry and valor than a hereditary aristocracy has for brains. Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional or managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts. Even the concept of a republic of letters, which might be expected to appeal to elites with such a large stake in higher education, is almost entirely absent from their frame of reference.”

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“The propositions that accompany most of the chapters . . . are not as snappy as I would prefer—but there’s a reason for their caution and caveats. On certain important points, the clamor of genuine scientific dispute has abated and we don’t have to argue about them anymore. But to meet that claim requires me to state the propositions precisely. I am prepared to defend all of them as “things we don’t have to argue about anymore”—but exactly as I worded them, not as others may paraphrase them. Here they are: 1. Sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide and tend to widen in more gender-egalitarian cultures. 2. On average, females worldwide have advantages in verbal ability and social cognition while males have advantages in visuospatial abilities and the extremes of mathematical ability. 3. On average, women worldwide are more attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocations centered on things. 4. Many sex differences in the brain are coordinate with sex differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior. 5. Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity. 6. Evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local. 7. Continental population differences in variants associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common. 8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality, abilities, and social behavior. 9. Class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have a substantial genetic component. 10. Outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior.”

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“The "left" ABC (Anything But Class) theorists say we are giving too much attention to class. Who exactly is doing that? Surveying the mainstream academic publications, radical journals, and socialist scholars conferences, one is hard put to find much class analysis of any kind. Far from giving too much attention to class power, most U.S. writers and commentators have yet to discover the subject. While pummeling a rather minuscule Marxist Left, the ABC theorists would have us think they are doing courageous battle against hordes of Marxists who dominate intellectual discourse in this country-yet another hallucination they hold in common with conservatives”

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“Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilisations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming, “All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas,” and so he was obliged to assert gentility, lest he slip into the abyss where nothing counts, and the statements of Democracy are inaudible.”

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“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips black in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don't do it--she's the wrong woman, he's the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty blank face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don't do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it”

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“Our goals are simple enough to understand: we want to humanize the planet, to break down the national structures which separate us as people, the corporate structures which separate us into distinct classes, the racist structures which separate us according to skin color; to conserve air, water, life in its many forms; to create communities which are more than habitable—communities in which people are free, in which people have what they need, in which groups of people do not accumulate power, or money, or goods, through the exploitation of other people.”

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Book:Woman Hating
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