To be truely radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
— Raymond Williams (A British Historian)
Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
— Francis Bacon
Hope is not a utopian dream. You have to stand up and work for it.
— John Murphy, cited by Elizabeth Bernstein in An Emotion We All Need More of
Despair is a luxury. If I despair I can drive a Yukon and watch bad television. Despair makes no demand upon us; hope demands everything. For people around the world, in places like Burma and Chiapas, giving up means accepting hideous conditions of life, or death. Despair is cheap for us, expensive for them. What does it mean to be radical, to tell radical stories in our time, to win the battle of the story? The North American tradition seems to focus its activity on the exposé, the telling of the grim underside of what we know: the food is poison, the system is corrupt, the leaders are lying, the war is failing. There is a place for this, but you cannot base a revolution on the bad things the status quo forgot to mention. You need to tell the stories they are not telling, to learn to see where they are blind, to look at how the great changes of the world come from the shadows and the margins, not center stage, to see where we’re winning and that we can win something that matters, if not everything all the time.
— Rebecca Solnit.
I pin my hope to quiet processes and small circles, in which vital and transforming events take place.
— Rufus Jones
“Its not what we think, its how we act, whats true. The only recognizable feature of hope is action.”
— Jodie Evans
“Beauty happens in space that is messy.”
— Jodie Evans