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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.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Even
Calm
People
Survival
Majority
Conditions
Beyond
Altruistic
Risk
Improvise
Others
Resourceful
Great
Beautifully

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
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In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.
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In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation and trivialization to feel engaged, connected, purposeful, ready to give, to engage, to care, to learn.
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To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.
Rebecca Solnit
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What gets called 'the sixties' left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems the most fundamental and most pervasive in all the ensuing changes is the loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of science, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness.
Rebecca Solnit
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[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
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I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.
Rebecca Solnit
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It's all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane.
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Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it's part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the U.S.
Rebecca Solnit
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The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined now.
Rebecca Solnit
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The poor have often been subversive just because they don't always believe their own depiction as brutes and loafers and leeches, and new economy is making lots more poor or recognize their fellowship with the insecurity of the poor, the portion of the population for whom the system does not work.
Rebecca Solnit
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Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
Rebecca Solnit
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I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.
Rebecca Solnit
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The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes.
Rebecca Solnit
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Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.
Rebecca Solnit
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There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.
Rebecca Solnit
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We are moving into a world of unaccountable and secretive corporations that manage all our communications and work hand in hand with governments to make us visible to them. Our privacy is being strip-mined and hoarded.
Rebecca Solnit
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The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.
Rebecca Solnit
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We fly we dream in darkness we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit