Call Them by Their True Names Quotes

“You do what you can. What you'd done may do more than you can imagine for generations to come. You plant a seed and a tree grows from it; will there be fruit, shade, habitat for birds, more seeds, a forest, wood to build a cradle or a house? You don't know. A tree can live much longer than you. So will an idea, and sometimes the changes that result from accepting that new idea about what is true, or right, just might remake the world. You do what you can do; you do your best; what what you do does is not up to you.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“In fact, what is sometimes regarded as an inconsistency in the contemporary right-wing platform—the desire to regulate women’s reproductive activity in particular, and sexuality in general, while deregulating everything else—is only inconsistent if you regard women as people. If you regard women as an undifferentiated part of nature, their bodies are just another place a man has every right to go.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written. It’s an informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we might play in it. Hope looks forward but draws its energies from the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and imperfections. It means not fetishizing the perfect that is the enemy of the good, not snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, not assuming you know what will happen when the future is unwritten, and part of what happens is up to us.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“This is why I pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“This work will only mater if it's sustained. To sustain it, people have to believe that the myriad small, incremental actions matter. That they matter even when the consequences aren't immediate or obvious. They must remember that often when you fail at your immediate objective—to block a nominee or a pipeline or to pass a bill—that, even then, you may have changed the whole framework in ways that make broader change more possible. You may change the story or the rules, give tools, templates, or encouragements to future activists, and make it possible for those around you to persist in their efforts.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“Cynicism is, first of all, a style of presenting oneself, and more than anything, cynics take pride in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both of those things.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that the white kids are “hanging out” but the Black kids are “loitering” or “lurking.” Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“In the fall of 2017, we began to consider anew how violence, hate, and discrimination push people out, and how the stories we have are haunted by the ghosts of the stories we never got.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“The current President's verbal abuse of language itself - with his slurred, sloshing semi-coherent word salad and his insistence that truth and fact are whatever he wants them to be, even if he wants them to be different from what they were yesterday, no matter what else he's serving, he's always serving meaninglessness.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“When a corporation writes something off, it accepts the cost. When we write off corporations as inherently corrupt, we accept the cost, too.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“Naïve cynicism loves itself more than the world; it defends itself in lieu of defending the world. I'm interested in the people who love the world more, and in what they have to tell us.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“Where a dog may growl, bristle, or bite you if you poke it with a stick, it will have no such reaction if you insult its god or its sports team or talk about someone you know who poked another dog.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and living species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by its true name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“The search for meaning is in how you live your life but also in how you describe it and what else is around you. As I say in one of the essays in this book, “Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everthing else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good, itÄs also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“Almost no one I know calls friends merely to have the kind of long, reflective, intimate conversations that were common in earlier decades; phones are for practical exchanges—renegotiating plans, checking in on arrangements. Emails, which in the 1990s seemed to resemble letters, now resemble texting, brief bursts of words in a small space, not to be composed as art, archived, or mused over much. A lot of people are too busy to hang out without a clear purpose, or don’t know that you can, and the often combative arenas and abstracted contact of social media replace physical places (including churches) to hang out in person.

Correspondence, that beautiful word, describes both an exchange of letters and the existence of affinities; we correspond because we correspond. As a young woman, I had long, intense conversations with other young women about difficult mothers, unreliable men, about heartaches and ambitions and anxieties. Sometimes these conversations were circular; sometimes they got bogged down by our inability to accept that we weren’t going to get what seemed right or fair. But at their best, they reinforced that our perceptions and emotions were not baseless or illegitimate, that others were on our side and shared our experiences, that we had value and possibility. We were strengthening ourselves and our ties to one another.

Conversation is a principal way that we convey our support and love to each other; it’s how we find out who our friends are and often how friendship takes place. A friendship could be imagined as an ongoing conversation, and a conversation as a collaboration of minds, and that collaboration as a brick out of which a culture or a community is built.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“Some of us are surrounded by destructive people who tell us we’re worthless when we’re endlessly valuable, that we’re stupid when we’re smart, that we’re failing even when we succeed. But the opposite of people who drag you down isn’t people who build you up and butter you up. It’s equals who are generous but keep you accountable, true mirrors who reflect back who you are and what you are doing.
We keep each other honest, we keep each other good with our feedback, our intolerance of meanness and falsehood, our demands that the people we are with listen, respect, respond—as we are allowed to, if we are free and valued ourselves.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“Disruption has been a favorite word of the Tech economy, but old-timers saw homes, communities, traditions, and relationships being disrupted.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“..this administration has been in effect a slow-motion coup, in how it gained power and how it exercises power, violating the rule of law and the standards of the office a little and then a little more and a little more, profiting and wrecking as they go”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself, on your own.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“Once a utopia in the eyes of many, San Francisco became the nerve center of a new dystopia.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“we now talk about normalization, extractivism, unburnable carbon; about walking while Black, gaslighting, the prison-industrial complex and the new Jim Crow, affirmative consent, cisgender, concern trolling, whataboutism, the manosphere, and so much more.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

“forth. You deny the relationship between cause”
― Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises