I feel enormously blessed to be a successful black woman writer in this culture, but I have found my small fame, such as it is, to be very isolating… because I think that especially for black women, the more we rise from the bottom, the more we move and journey, the more we are the targets of the most brutal and vicious attacks. —bell hooks, black feminist social critic

In The Fray Contributor

I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that’s becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism. —bell hooks, black feminist social critic

In The Fray Contributor

I’m so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer. —bell hooks, black feminist social critic

In The Fray Contributor

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. —bell hooks, black feminist social critic

In The Fray Contributor

Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible. —bell hooks, black feminist social critic

In The Fray Contributor

We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they’re beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved. —bell hooks, black feminist social critic

In The Fray Contributor

When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us. —bell hooks, black feminist social critic

In The Fray Contributor

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere. —Lionel Trilling, American critic

In The Fray Contributor

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us. —Lionel Trilling, American critic

In The Fray Contributor

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. —Dwight D. Eisenhower, former U.S. president

In The Fray Contributor

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. —Dwight D. Eisenhower, former U.S. president

In The Fray Contributor

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. —Dwight D. Eisenhower, former U.S. president

In The Fray Contributor