Quotes About Impact

Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.

She regained the voice taken away from her and with it rehumanized her dehumanized self. She spoke words that built a cage around him, erected a monument to his casual malice, words that will likely follow him all his life. Her voice was her power.

Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes

Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act.

You can't assume that you know why what you're doing matters. You can't at least declare failure immediately, because consequences are not always direct, or immediate, or obvious, and the indirect consequences matter.

Charles Fritz wrote in 1957] 'Movement toward the disaster area usually is both quantitatively and qualitatively more significant that flight or evacuation from the scene of destruction.

There are other things I'd rather write about, but this affects everything else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren't so busy surviving.

You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.

The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers resonate most.

Language, loose language, vague language becomes an out. Things happen.

Disruption has been a favorite word of the Tech economy, but old-timers saw homes, communities, traditions, and relationships being disrupted.

Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.

The IPCC report explains that every single metric ton of carbon dioxide we prevent from entering the atmosphere lessens the severity of the impacts we bake into the system. Our assessment meticulously describes how every fraction of a degree of warming matters—the scale and severity of impacts begin to compound and cascade with higher levels of warming.

The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers often resonate most.

Sometimes, cause and effect are centuries apart

seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything.

In 1990, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported, "Studies of the Surgeon General's office reveal that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, more common than automobile accidents, muggings, and cancer deaths combined.

You don't have to subscribe to a political ideology, move to a commune, or join the guerrillas in the mountains; you wake up in a society suddenly transformed, and chances are good you will be part of that transformation in what you do, in whom you connect to, in how you feel. Something changes.

We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision.

Disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility, and what manifests there matters elsewhere, in ordinary times and in other extraordinary times.

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.

We'd never set eyes on each other before. But that's the work that books do, reaching out further than their writers.

because though a rape is reported only every 6.2 minutes in this country, the estimated total is perhaps five times as high.

hope they remember that when they get older. When they count up the things I did and didn't do. I never gave the drinking a second