An extraordinary imaginative power to reinvent ourselves is at large in the world, though it is hard to say how it will counteract the dead weight of neoliberalism, fundamentalisms, environmental destructions, and well-marketed mindlessness.

the more profound revolutions that had unfolded in our lifetimes, around race, gender, sexuality, food, economics, and so much more, the slow incremental victories that begin in the imagination and change the rules.

How do we get back to the struggle over the future? I think you have to hope, and hope in this sense is not a prize or a gift, but something you earn through study, through resisting the ease of despair, and through digging tunnels, cutting windows, opening doors, or finding the people who do these things.

Individual hearts and minds change; those who have been changed become aware of one another; still others are emboldened, in a contagion of boldness; the “impossible” becomes possible; immediately it is done, surprising the actors almost as much as their opponents; and suddenly, almost with the swiftness of thought—whose transformation has in fact