Hope in the Dark

That loss comes from many quarters: from exhaustion, from a sadness born out of empathy, but also from expectations

One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,”

Carlos Quijano was when he said that sins against hope are the only sins beyond forgiveness and redemption.

I say all this because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope

Who, two decades ago, could have imagined a world in which the Soviet Union had vanished and the Internet had arrived? Who then dreamed that the political prisoner Nelson Mandela would become president of a transformed South Africa?

world that will remain wilder than our imaginations.

There are major movements that failed to achieve their goals; there are also comparatively small gestures that mushroomed into successful revolutions.

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.

Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.