Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

A game of checkers ends. The weather never does. That’s why you can’t save anything. Saving is the wrong word, one invoked over and over again, for almost every cause. Jesus saves and so do banks: they set things aside from the flux of earthly change. We never did save the whales, though we might have prevented them from becoming extinct. We will h

People in official institutions devoutly believe they hold the power that matters, though the power we grant them can often be taken back;

Violence is the power of the state; imagination and nonviolence the power of civil society.

an enormous project going on among many disciplines—psychology, economics, neurobiology, sociology, anthropology, political science—to redefine human nature as something more communal, cooperative, and compassionate.

The activists who deny their own power and possibility likewise choose to shake off their sense of obligation: if they are doomed to lose, they don’t have to do very much except situate themselves as beautiful losers or at least virtuous ones.

If it happens, it will come to look like it always was a good idea, and the first people to have espoused it will be forgotten, since they were kooks, extremists, and impractical dreamers. No one in the center will remember when they supported what now looks like bad science and bad engineering, just as few remember when they supported racial segre

commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.

Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited.

Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising: