American - Writer | June 24, 1961 -
The world you live in is not a given; much of what is best in it has been built through the struggles of passionate activists over the last centuries. They won us many freedoms and protected many beauties. Count those gifts among your growing heap.
Rebecca Solnit
LiveBestWorldYouGrowingOver
The great majority of people are calm, resourceful, altruistic or even beyond altruistic, as they risk themselves for others. We improvise the conditions of survival beautifully.
GreatPeopleCalmSurvivalBeyond
People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.
CommunityChildrenPeopleLostBuild
It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.
ChangeRelationshipLieDoing
For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It's this dead zone between two places. But to walk, you're some place that's already interesting. You're not just between places. Things are happening.
CarWalkMeAirplaneInteresting
I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.
LifeGratefulMeVoiceEarlyWill
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another fortysomething years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.
LiveMenManMeKnowMore
I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way.
FuturePastPeopleLanguageFeel
We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
WorldSocietyOpportunitiesSometimes
It's not that bad things never happen. But there's a pattern in which most people are calm, resourceful, altruistic, and they improvise emergency systems that work really well - whether it's getting the babies out of a collapsed hospital or putting together a community kitchen to feed everybody for the next few months.
WorkCommunityTogetherPeopleCalm
Panic is rare, looting is essentially insignificant, people are not terrified and trampling each other to flee from a disaster scene, but in fact are trying to manage a situation. We may in fact revert to some sort of primordial civility.
PeopleTryingSituationCivilityMay
To say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inversion of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.'
VisionHellSayEverythingWithout
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Rebecca Solnit quotes