Love Quote by Bell Hooks

Hooks opens with a provocation dressed as confession: she didn’t set out to write a “book on love” because love is pretty or private, but because it’s politically endangered. The line hinges on that jarring diagnosis, “the United States is moving away from love,” treating love less like a mood and more like a civic capacity. In hooks’s universe, love isn’t a Hallmark abstraction; it’s a practice with measurable consequences, a discipline that shows up in how we raise children, structure work, distribute safety, and imagine who counts as fully human.

The intent is diagnostic and strategic. By framing love as something a nation can “move away from,” she implies a drift driven by forces with names: racism, patriarchy, consumer capitalism, militarism, punitive governance. The subtext is that Americans are being trained to confuse love with possession, romance with rescue, and intimacy with domination. When a society prizes winning over care and markets over community, “love” becomes sentimental cover for systems that remain, in practice, loveless.

Context matters: hooks wrote through the late Cold War, the rise of neoliberalism, culture-war polarization, and the commodification of selfhood. Her critique anticipates our current attention economy, where outrage is profitable and empathy is treated as a soft luxury. The sentence works because it refuses nostalgia while still mourning a loss. It turns a seemingly personal motive into an indictment of national priorities, then invites the reader into the uncomfortable possibility that love is not what we feel, but what we are willing to build.