"Never underestimate your ability to make someone else's life better - even if you never know it."  --Olympic diver, four-time gold medalist Greg Louganis

“Every progressive knows that human beings are equal and that the fight for that equality implies physical and mental emancipation and therefore, no one who considers themselves human can generalize transphobia in weak minds or slavery and discrimination. This action does not express animality but brutality. That’s why they murder those who are different and by the millions. That is why Nazis existed and exist.”  --President Gustavo Petro of Columbia 7-2-24

“A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.”  --Susan Sontag 

"(But) that is the aspect of Schumann’s gift that is most unusual: personal as his music may be, what it describes is universal enough that a remarkable number of people feel that it has a special resonance for them. It is music that articulates the most private thoughts of a large public—individual by individual.

"And to be clear, I am speaking about a very extreme degree of privacy. There are, for all of us, the things we tell everyone, the things we tell just a few people, the things we tell only loved ones (and perhaps therapists), and the things we tell only ourselves. And then, of course, there are the things we do not even admit to ourselves; it is at that level that Schumann’s music operates. Over and over again, in piece after piece, he reaches deep within himself for that which is most obscured, and makes it feel like everyone’s obscurity. This is a quality to be treasured; it is also dangerous as hell. To acknowledge one’s frailty is healthy; to stare at it repeatedly, with a magnifying glass, under fluorescent lights, is not. But that is just what Schumann does."  --Jonathan Bliss

"Everything which goes on in the world affects me, politics, literature, people. I think about everything in my own way, which then wants to find a release through music; it wants to find an outlet. That is why many of my compositions are so difficult to understand, for they establish ties with distant interests, often importantly so, because everything that is strange in our times moves me and I must then articulate it musically in turn."  --Robert Schumann

"What storytellers do — and this includes journalists and TED and everyone in between who has a point of view and an audience, whatever its size — is help shape our stories of how the world works; at their very best, they can empower our moral imagination to envision how the world could work better. In other words, they help us mediate between the ideal and the real by cultivating the right balance of critical thinking and hope. Truth and falsehood belong to this mediation, but it is guided primarily by what we are made to believe is real.

"What we need, then, are writers like William Faulkner, who came of age in a brothel, saw humanity at its most depraved, and yet managed to maintain his faith in the human spirit. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he asserted that the writer’s duty is “to help man endure by lifting his heart.” In contemporary commercial media, driven by private interest, this responsibility to work in the public interest and for the public good recedes into the background. And yet I continue to stand with E.B. White, who so memorably asserted that “writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life”; that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down.” 

"Yes, people sometimes do horrible things, and we can speculate about why they do them until we run out of words and sanity. But evil only prevails when we mistake it for the norm. There is so much goodness in the world — all we have to do is remind one another of it, show up for it, and refuse to leave."  --Maria Popova, "Hope, Cynicism, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves"

"The victim shows us something about our own lives: we see that we too are vulnerable to misfortune, that we are not any different from the people whose fate we are watching, and we therefore have reason to fear a similar reversal ...

"Tragedy asks us … to walk a delicate line. We are to acknowledge that life’s miseries strike deep, striking to the heart of human agency itself. And yet we are also to insist that they do not remove humanity, that the capacity for goodness remains when all else has been removed ...

"If we understand that injustice can strike its roots into the personality itself, producing rage and resentment and the roots of bad character, we have even deeper incentives to commit ourselves to giving each child the material and social support that human dignity requires. A compassionate society … is one that takes the full measure of the harms that can befall citizens beyond their own doing; compassion thus provides a motive to secure to all the basic support that will undergird and protect human dignity."  --Martha Nussbaum

“The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely.”  --Irvin D. Yalom

“[N]ot everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”  --James Baldwin

"Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons ...

"It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings ...

"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone ...

"It’s important to emphasize that hope is only a beginning; it’s not a substitute for action, only a basis for it."

--Rebecca Solnit from _Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities_ (2017)

“We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. That is what governs us. We have a bipolar system.”  -- Maira Kalman

“There is no love of life without despair of life”  --Albert Camus