Out of the Wreckage Quotes

“By rebuilding community, we become proud of our society, proud of our institutions, proud of our nations, proud of ourselves. By coming together we discover who we are. We ignite our capacity for empathy and altruism. Togetherness and belonging allow us to become the heroes of the story.”
― George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in the Age of Crisis

“The most grotesque doctrines can look like common sense when embedded in a compelling narrative,”
― George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis

“The failure to tell a new story has been matched by an equally remarkable omission: the failure to discern and describe the values and principles that might inform our politics.”
― George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis

“By rebuilding community, we will renew democracy and the hope we invest in it. We will develop political systems that are not so big that they cannot respond to us but not so small that they cannot meet the problems we face. We will achieve something that, paradoxically, we cannot realise alone: self-reliance. By helping each other, we help ourselves. The strong, embedded cultures”
― George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in the Age of Crisis

“Holiday and airline companies have worked hard to persuade us that living the dream means travelling the world, seeking novel experiences. But I suspect what many people want above all else is a strong sense of home: to be embedded in a thriving and caring community.”
― George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in the Age of Crisis

“In his illuminating book Don’t Even Think About It, George Marshall explains that ‘stories perform a fundamental cognitive function: they are the means by which the Emotional Brain makes sense of the information collected by the Rational Brain. People may hold information in the form of data and figures, but their beliefs about it are held entirely in the form of stories.’1 When we encounter a complex issue and try to understand it, what we look for is not consistent and reliable facts but a consistent and comprehensible story. When we ask ourselves whether something ‘makes sense’, the ‘sense’ we seek is not rationality, as scientists and philosophers perceive it, but narrative fidelity. Does what we are hearing reflect the way we expect humans and the world to behave? Does it hang together? Does it progress as stories should progress?”
― George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in the Age of Crisis