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Quotes from Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power — Rebecca Solnit

born 1961 United States

← All quotes by Rebecca Solnit

11 quotes

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

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)

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

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)

I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good (p61)

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)

A better world, yes; a perfect world, never. (p82)

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)

Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. (p17)

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)

People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end. (p27)

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)

Inside the word "emergency" is "emerge"; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters. (p12)

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)

Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)

The revolutionary days I have been outlining are days in which hope is no longer fixed on the future: it becomes an electrifying force in the present. (p108)

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)

The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way to save face. It's also a way to forget the power of a story and of a storyteller, the power in the margins, and the potential for change.

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)

The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden—which is to say that revolution doesn't necessarily look like revolution.

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Rebecca Solnit (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.