Hope Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

“Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society.”

— Rebecca Solnit

“What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.”

— Rebecca Solnit

“I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...”

— Rebecca Solnit

To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

— Rebecca Solnit

“To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the…

— Rebecca Solnit

Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky… hope is an ax you…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Political awareness without activism means looking at the devastation, your face turned toward the center of things. Activism can generate hope because…

— Rebecca Solnit

As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Stories migrate secretly. The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way…

— Rebecca Solnit

“You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called…

— Rebecca Solnit

“For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of…

— Rebecca Solnit

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience,…

— Rebecca Solnit

“We are winning,” said the graffiti in Seattle, not “We have won.” It’s a way of telling in which you can feel…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it;…

— Rebecca Solnit

“We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world's real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think…

— Rebecca Solnit

“The term 'politics of prefiguration' has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you…

— Rebecca Solnit

“There's a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that sometimes seems to make the left the…

— Rebecca Solnit

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief…

— Rebecca Solnit

“...William Stegner...coined the term 'the geography of hope,' countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could…

— Rebecca Solnit

“The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible,…

— Rebecca Solnit

To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the…

— Rebecca Solnit

“To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice anti-authoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going…

— Rebecca Solnit

“The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual…

— Rebecca Solnit

“To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity.…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task. It involves being hopeful and motivated and keeping eyes on…

— Rebecca Solnit

“But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity.…

— Rebecca Solnit