Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

The rights of man" was one of the great phrases of the French Revolution, but it's always been questionable whether it included the rights of women.

Those are all exceptional crimes, but we could also talk about quotidian assaults, because though a rape is reported only every 6.2 minutes in this country, the estimated total is perhaps five times as high.

At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to choose—between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation. If ideas don't go back in the box, there's still been a huge effort to put women back in their place. Or the place misogynists think we belong in, a place of silence and powerlessness.

Women Strike for Peace was founded by women who were tired of making the coffee and doing the typing and not having any voice or decision-making

Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family.

Es la arrogancia lo que lo hace difícil, en ocasiones, para cualquier mujer en cualquier campo; es la que mantiene a las mujeres alejadas de expresar lo que piensan y de ser escuchadas cuando se atreven a hacerlo; la que sumerge en el silencio a las mujeres jóvenes indicándoles, de la misma manera que lo hace el acoso callejero, que este no es su mundo.

There are lovely and wonderful men out there, and one of the things that's encouraging in this round of the war against women is how many men I've seen who get it, who think it's their issue too, who stand up for us and with us in everyday life, online and in the marches from New Delhi to San Francisco this winter.

When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whatever it's immersed in—the surrounding culture's illness.

Fritz's first radical premise is that everyday life is already a disaster of sorts, one from which actual disaster liberates us.

Secondo me le basi della speranza sono, semplicemente: ignorare cosa succederà e sapere che l'improbabile e l'inimmaginabile accadranno con una certa regolarità. E che la storia non ufficiale nel mondo mostra come l'impegno degli individui e i movimenti popolari possano influenzarla e ottenere qualcosa, anche se non si può prevedere come e se ce la faremo, né quanto tempo ci vorrà.

Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase "same-sex marriage" for the term "marriage equality." The phrase is ordinarily employed to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was.

No mundo todo, as mulheres entre 15 e 44 anos de idade têm mais probabilidade de morrer ou de serem mutiladas pela violência masculina do que por câncer, malária, guerras e acidentes de trânsito, tudo somado", escreve Nicholas D. Kristof, colunista do The New York Times, uma das poucas figuras de renome que trata dessa questão regularmente.

When I recovered the blouse, I lost the memory, for the two were irreconcilable. It vanished in an instant, and I saw it go. Sometimes you hear of murals and miraculously preserved bodies buried, sealed, protected from light for hundreds or thousands of years. Exposed to the fresh air and light for the first time, they begin to fade, crumble, disappear. Sometimes gaining and losing are more intimately related than we like to think.

The beauty of those places I are with me still. And in all of the dreams, as in my waking life, was the love of place. The sense that places were embodiments of emotions, where anchors were companions of a sort. Even protectors or parents.

Opposition is often illusory.

it's okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped.

Even decay is a form of transformation into other living things, part of the great rampage of becoming that is also unbecoming.

If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.

violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

but embracing or resisting are optional, and metamorphosis inevitable.

Incidentally, if you Google 'female careerism,' you get a bunch of links, but if you Google 'male careerism,' Google asks if you really meant 'male careers' or even 'mahle careers.' 'Careerism'—the pathological need to have paid employment—is an affliction that only affects women, apparently.

I think sometimes that I became a historian because I didn't have a history, but also because I was interested in telling the truth in a family in which truth was an elusive entity.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always heading," wrote Oscar Wilde

I always knew that my middle name was an anglicized version of a great-grandmother's name, but I dropped it in my teens, not liking its sound and feeling that a middle name was unnecessary, given how few people have my last name. Only now have I realized which great-grandmother that name belonged to, only writing this story do I know the name of that unknown woman and that it is also mine, or is now the blank space between my names.