Politics & Power Quote by Bell Hooks

Hooks smuggles a moral provocation inside the softest of phrases: "perfect love". It sounds devotional, almost sentimental, until she immediately binds it to "without fear" and drags it into the civic bloodstream. Love, for hooks, is never a private mood. It's a discipline with political consequences, and she’s asking what happens when that discipline collides with a public sphere organized around panic.

The sentence works by yoking the intimate and the geopolitical. Fear is the hinge: the feeling that shrinks a relationship into possession, and the feeling that shrinks a nation into a fortress. When she names "xenophobic" and "tortured", she frames the present not as a normal cycle of reaction but as a damaged condition - a society in pain that converts that pain into scapegoats. "Fundamentalism and nationalism" arrive as sibling ideologies: both promise purity, both require enemies, both market belonging by narrowing who counts as human.

The subtext is sharper than the vocabulary. Hooks is challenging the reader to treat love as an antidote to the pleasures of fear - the quick hit of certainty, the comfort of tribe, the righteousness of exclusion. "What that means for us" is collective accountability, not self-help. In the late-20th and early-21st century landscape she wrote into - culture wars, resurgent nativism, post-9/11 securitization - love becomes a counter-practice to the era’s dominant emotion: suspicion. She’s not romanticizing kindness; she’s naming fear as the engine of authoritarian moods, and insisting that resisting it starts in how we choose to see strangers.