Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Women gain opportunities in times of upheaval when societal norms break down, allowing anyone to take action.
This quote by Rebecca Solnit emphasizes how revolutions create spaces for individuals, particularly women, to rise and take on significant roles when traditional structures and rules are disrupted. It highlights the potential for agency and action in periods of transformation, suggesting that the breakdown of established norms can lead to greater participation and influence for those previously marginalized.
Themes
WomenRevolutionAgencyActionChangeOpportunity
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about women in leadership, one might say, 'As Rebecca Solnit noted, women often find great roles in revolution, highlighting the importance of agency in times of change.'
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.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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
Similar quotes
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
William JamesRead
If you look at a great city, one of its amazing features is that you're going to find all sorts of things that you might not specifically have chosen in advance. And they will change your day. Maybe your month. Maybe your whole life.
Cass SunsteinRead
The time we are living in is the greatest opportunity to be queer, and it is almost the most dangerous time because everything is up for grabs.
Binyavanga WainainaRead
Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
Zadie SmithRead
The world has entered an era of the most profound and challenging change in human history.
Stephen CoveyRead
When we confront facts and fears, we achieve real power and unleash our capacity for change.
Margaret HeffernanRead