Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Violence undermines individual rights and freedoms, notably the fundamental right to life.
In this quote, Rebecca Solnit emphasizes the severe consequences of violence, arguing that it represents a profound oppression that strips individuals of their essential rights, with the most critical being the right to life itself. By labeling violence as the worst form of tyranny, she suggests that it not only affects the immediate victims but also impacts the social fabric, creating a climate of fear and helplessness that undermines freedom and dignity for all.
Themes
ViolenceTyrannyRightsFreedomOppression
In practice
Example use cases
A speaker at a human rights conference might use this quote to highlight the importance of non-violent resistance.
More from Rebecca Solnit
All quotes βI still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
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We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
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If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
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The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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