Rebecca Solnit Quotes

Corporations always are controlling things, and we have the ability every day to do something about that. Every day.

Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience.

The big companies are like steel and activists are like heat. Activists soften the steel, and then I can bend it into pretty grillwork and make reforms.

I would say first of all, anyone who wants to challenge the status quo always gets that response. Ninety percent of the time, that's just bull. That's just the way in which people choose to prop up their own privilege or their own particular position. So mostly I shrug it off.

I don't think that people in power can be convinced by words or articles. They will never give it up by choice.

Speaking truth to power is never going to be easy.

Somehow, the guys in power have to be reached by counter-power, or through a change in their hearts and minds, or change will not come.

The gatekeepers don't control the gates, and the powers that be aren't as powerful.

It's the reason why I am always interested in engaging in people who are pushing us and pushing against the status quo. But having been an activist, the only thing that I'm always encouraging activists to do is, once you have raised the issue, and even through controversial means, you have to come behind it with an agenda and the possibility of reconciliation if power meets your demands.

When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.

I was always doing revolutionary things, things that would alert people, so they would stop being so subservient.

If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.

The power of the people is much stronger than the people in power.

We just have to convince other people that they have power. This is what they can do by participating to make change, not only in their community, but many times changing in their own lives. Once they participate, they get their sense of power.

Ordinary people can bring about change.

People have far more power than they realize, if they would only choose to use it.

I get a lot of death threats. But the way I look at it, I feel I have a moral obligation to do the best I can to make the country better for everybody, and that threatens certain people because they're going to have much less power. I want the power to go back to people making decisions over their own lives rather than some experts making it.

The sixties were a time when ordinary people could do extraordinary things . . . !

The people who think that the power of big business is enormous are mistaken

Establishment suggests there must be some Wizard of Oz somewhere pulling the strings. That's not the way it works. There are individuals like myself. I sat there and watched Donald Trump, and I said, look, someone has got to say something.

There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.

I chose to be an agitator. And there's one interesting thing about being an agitator - and I tell people - the next time you put your underwear in the washing machine, take the agitator out, and all you're going to end up with is some dirty, wet drawers.

The problem is that too often the only people who can act don't want change. Power doesn't so much corrupt as it breeds conservatism.

Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rootedlike oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever.