Quotes About Hope

The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.

Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task. It involves being hopeful and motivated and keeping eyes on the prize ahead. Saying that everything is fine or that it will never get any better are ways of going nowhere or of making it impossible to go anywhere. Either approach implies that there is no road out or that, if there is, you don't need to or can't go down it. You can. We have.

Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable. To understand that difficult is not the same as impossible.

There's so much other work love has to do in the world.

Nearly all of us would like to be at the end of the story, because to live in the middle of it is to live in suspense and uncertainty about what will happen.

Those who doubt that these moments matter should note how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear signifies their recognition that popular power is real enough to overturn regimes and rewrite the social contract. And it often has. Sometimes your enemies know what your friends can't believe. Those who dismiss these moments because of their imperfections, limitations, or incompleteness need to look harder at what joy and hope shine out of them

Certain kinds of beauty make people weep, the moments "when hope and history rhyme

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.

Political awareness without activism means looking at the devastation, your face turned toward the center of things. Activism can generate hope because in itself it constitutes an alternative and turns away from the corruption at the center to face the wild possibilities and the heroes at the edges or at your side.

There are those who see despair as solidarity with the oppressed, though the oppressed may not particularly desire that version of themselves, since they may have had a life before being victims and might hope to have one after.

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

Naïve cynicism loves itself more than the world; it defends itself in lieu of defending the world. I'm interested in the people who love the world more, and in what they have to tell us.

The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and writing this book I now see how this is connected to the politics of hope and to those revolutionary days that are the days of creation of the world. Decentralization and direct democracy could, in one definition, be this politic in which people are producers, possessed of power and vision, in an unfinished world.

though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn't enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons

Here is that road, maybe a thousand miles long, and the woman walking down it isn't at mile one. I don't know how far she has to go, but I know she's not going backward, despite it all - and she's not walking alone.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present, or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future...Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don't have that memory, and that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans

Two Winter Walks To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.

What gives me hope is that human history is full of examples of people across the ages who have risen to face the great challenges of their time and have succeeded. Victory is not the arrival in some promised land; it is the series of imperfect victories along the way that edge us closer to building the critical mass that eventually shifts the status quo.

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

Despair is also often premature: it's a form of impatience as well as of certainty.

To recognize the momentousness of what has happened is to apprehend what might happen. 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.

Waiting until everything looks feasible is too long to wait.

Alguna vez las revoluciones fueron lo que pensamos que serían?