Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

a BBC report on a study of rape in Asia. The study concluded that in many cases the motive for rape was the idea that a man has the right to have sex with a woman regardless of her desires. In other words, his rights trump hers, or she has none.

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another forty-something years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.

Tobin James Mueller: 'No one is turned away, my one rule. I never say no. That's one of the reasons it became a utopia.

What is the moral equivalent of war—not the equivalent of its carnage, its xenophobias, its savagery—but its urgency, its meaning, its solidarity? What else generates what he called the "civic temperament"?

Everyone is influenced by those things that precede formal education, that come out of the blue and out of everyday life. Those excluded influences I call the grandmothers.

On two occasions around that time, I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest—in a nutshell, female.

As the feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman puts it in her book Trauma and Recovery: "His correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. . . . Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients." If they were telling the truth, he would have to challenge the whole edifice of patriarchal authority to support them.

A significant portion of the women you know are survivors.

Most of my life, I would have doubted myself and backed down. Having public standing as a writer of history helped me stand my ground, but few women get that boost, and billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever.

James continued. "The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.

When I think back to why I was apolitical into my mid-twenties I see that being politically engaged means having a sense of your own power--that what you do matters--and a sense of belonging, things that came to me only later and that do not come to all.

Motherhood and respectability became the armor, the costume, in which these women assaulted in one case the generals and in the other, a nuclear weapons program and war itself

Esto es lo que quiere decir democracia: que todo el mundo tiene voz, y que nadie se libra de las consecuencias de sus actos gracias a su riqueza, poder, raza o género.

Walking maintains the publicness and viability of public space.

Pero los hombres que explican cosas aún asumen que soy, en una obscena metáfora fecundadora, un recipiente vacío que debe ser rellenado con su sabiduría y conocimiento.

It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence comes from and what we can do about it a lot more productively. Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for the United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.

The thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word lost comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.

Language is power. When you turn "torture" into "enhanced interrogation," or murdered children into "collateral damage," you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care. But it works both ways. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself, on your own.

Los adolescentes se imaginan muriendo jóvenes porque les es más fácil imaginarse la muerte que imaginarse a la persona en la quizá los conviertan todas las decisiones y responsabilidades de la vida adulta.

I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deeper zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.

In those days we were exploring who we wished to become, what the world might give us, and what we might give it, and so, though we did not know it, wandering was our real work anyway.

To walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking is reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text as stable as that to be found in the garden, the labyrinth, or the stations.

The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anectodes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt.