Quotes About Challenge

The very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet's climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement.

This culture war intensity is the worst news of all because when you challenge a person's position on an issue core to his or her identity, facts and arguments are seen as little more than further attacks, easily deflected.

the only way" negotiators "can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."48

Carson's writing inspired a new, much more radical generation of environmentalists to see themselves as part of a fragile planetary ecosystem rather than as its engineers or mechanics, giving birth to the field of Ecological Economics. It was in this context that the underlying logic of extractivism—that there would always be more earth for us to consume—began to be forcefully challenged within the mainstream.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need. The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity.

Climate change is like that; it's hard to keep it in your head for very long.

They deny reality because the implications of that reality are, quite simply, unthinkable.

In French, "decroissance" has the double meaning of challenging both growth, croissance, and croire, to believe—invoking the idea of choosing not to believe in the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet.

You were challenged beyond the bounds of what could be done, and found a path to make it true.

A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true

A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.

If you will pardon my saying so, Tharkay said, you will never satisfy them on that point: the last thing you or Temeraire will ever give anyone is quiet obedience. Have you considered it might be better not to try?

I sat down and got out my current project, an extremely bad villanelle in which I was carefully avoiding the word pestilence, which was trying so hard to shove its way into every stanza that I was sure that if I actually wrote it down, the whole thing would turn into a tidy evocation of a new plague. I'm probably the only student who tries to prevent my writing assignments from turning into new spells.

then he spluttered at me, "You impossible, wretched, nonsensical contradiction, what on earth have you done now?" I

I stood panting with my hands clenched at my sides, still ringing head-to-foot, and said, Is that magic enough to put me on the list? Or do you want to see more? They stared at me, and in the silence I heard shouts outside in the courtyard, running feet. The guards were looking in with their hands on their sword-hilts, and I realized I'd just shaken the king's castle, in the king's city, and shouted at the highest wizards of the land.

When I say us, what I mean is them. I felt fine. No; I felt like I'd woken up after a long sleep and had a good workout in the fresh air and a really nice stretch and was now contemplating with interest the idea of a hearty lunch. Sitting on edge in a classroom for hours surrounded by fluffy peeping freshmen waiting for one mal to pop out at me: nightmarish. Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it.

I'd been trying really hard not to learn their names, but it wasn't going very well

Well, I don't know, yet, the dragonet said, but I mean to find a way: just because the business will be difficult is no excuse for not making the attempt.

No matter how hard you've worked, there's always something to worry about.

So he had actually come to my rescue. That was even worse.

he tried sitting next to me once and once only; I stared straight at him with all the murder in my heart and he stopped and took his hand out

I don't know if anyone who hasn't tried it can properly appreciate just how horrible it is to be constantly surrounded by people who believe in absolutely everything

it offended his sense of the proper order of things that my slapdash workings did work, and he scowled as much when I was doing well as when I had made some evident mistake.

I'd been ready to go down to the graduation hall and fight for my life; I'd been ready to fight for the lives of everyone I knew, for the chance of a future. I didn't need this much more to lose.