658 Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

We are, as a culture, moving to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.

The two most basic goals of social utopias are to eliminate deprivation – hunger, ignorance, homelessness – and to forge a society in which no one is an outsider, no one is alienated.

The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas.

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t.

Such speech aims to tranquilize and disempower the populace, to keep us isolated and at home, seduced into helplessness, just as more direct tyrannies seek to terrify citizens into isolation.

Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don’t depend on them.

Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

To feel for someone enlarges the self and then the self shares risks and pains.

Stories move in from the shadows to the limelight. And though the stage presents the drama of our powerlessness, the shadows offer the secret of our power.