Hope Phelps > Hope's Quotes

“I read a lot of psychogeography when I was younger. I believe in the spirit of places. Places where something horrible happened feel like places where something will happen again because they are haunted. They are marked. Places are characters to me. In general, I don’t think you can take the power back, not completely, but you can break the silence. I don’t know if that’s empowering.”
― Mariana Enríquez

“There’s something about the scale of the cruelty in political violence from the estate that always seems like the blackest magic to me. Like they have to satisfy some ravenous and ancient god that demands not only bodies but needs to be fed their suffering as well.”
― Mariana Enríquez

“The first element for putting fatalism aside is overcoming the exclusive focus on the present, not only by opening people's minds to the future, but also by recovering the memory of their personal and collective past. Only insofar as people and groups become aware of their historical roots, especially those events and conditions which have shaped their situation, can they gain the perspective they need to take the measure of their own identity. Knowing who you are means knowing where you come from and on whom you depend. There is no true self-knowledge that is not an acknowledgement of one's origins, one's community identity, and one's own history.”
― Ignacio Martín-Baró, Writings for a Liberation Psychology

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“The schools we go to are reflections of the society that created them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“I believe in Hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul. Subcommandante Marcos says,

"History written by Power taught us that we had lost... We did not believe what Power taught us. We skipped class when they taught conformity and idiocy. We failed modernity. We are united by the imagination, by creativity, by tomorrow. In the past we not met defeat but also found a desire for justice and the dream of being better. We left skepticism hanging from the hook of big capital and discovered that we could believe, that it was worth believing, that we should believe - in ourselves. Health to you, and don't forget that flowers, like hope, are harvested."

And they grow in the dark. "I believe," adds Thoreau, "in the forest, and the meadow, and the night in which the corn grows.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“241. Nor does this mean calling for forgiveness when it involves renouncing our own rights, confronting corrupt officials, criminals or those who would debase our dignity. We are called to love everyone, without exception; at the same time, loving an oppressor does not mean allowing him to keep oppressing us, or letting him think that what he does is acceptable. On the contrary, true love for an oppressor means seeking ways to make him cease his oppression; it means stripping him of a power that he does not know how to use, and that diminishes his own humanity and that of others. Forgiveness does not entail allowing oppressors to keep trampling on their own dignity and that of others, or letting criminals continue their wrongdoing. Those who suffer injustice have to defend strenuously their own rights and those of their family, precisely because they must preserve the dignity they have received as a loving gift from God. If a criminal has harmed me or a loved one, no one can forbid me from demanding justice and ensuring that this person – or anyone else – will not harm me, or others, again. This is entirely just; forgiveness does not forbid it but actually demands it.”
― Pope Francis

“We are not interested in government jobs and appointments, or statues and monuments, or museums, or going down in history, or prizes, or honors, or ceremonies. What we want is to be able to get up each morning without fear being part of the day's agenda. Fear of being indigenous, women, workers, homosexuals, lesbians, young, elderly, children, others. But we think this is not possible with the current system, within capitalism.”
― Subcommandante Marcos

“You have not died" may be nothing more than a chant if nobody keeps walking. Because from our modest and nonacademic point of view, the path is what matters, not the walker... When someone lives and dies fighting, in their absence do they tell us "remember me," "honor me," "carry me"? Or do they impose upon us a "continue," "don't give up," "don't surrender," "don't sell out"?... So in our final breath, will we Zapatistas ask: "Will I be remembered?" Or will we ask: "Was a step taken on the path? Is there someone to keep walking it?”
― Subcommandante Marcos

“Because justice, friends and enemies, also is preventing injustice from repeating itself or changing its name, face, flag, or ideological, political, racial, or gender pretext.”
― Subcommandante Marcos

“Power also uses calendars to neutralize movements that attack or have attacked its essence, its existence, or its normality. That's what commemorative dates are for. With them it narrows, limits, defines, and stops. With each day of the calendar that Above admits into its timeline, a takeover of history occurs. With these days, movements are stopped, they are terminated in all senses. There will be nothing above, in that calendarization of history, to account for the processes and movements that are reduced to one day. And so those dates are turned into statues. In Mexico, September 16 and November 20 have been mummified since the beginning of the long PRI era. Each year, the clique of criminals on duty - that is, the government - goes to monuments and parades only to ensure that Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos, Vincente Guerrero, Francisco Villa, and Emiliano Zapata remain dead.”
― Subcommandante Marcos

“In a nutshell, men and women who have wealth and power are human beings, as are women and men who have nothing more than their dignified rage. And up above they demand and insist: "We must say not to violence, wherever it comes from"... making sure to emphasize it if the violence comes from below. According to them, everyone must bring themselves into harmony for their differences and contradictions to be resolved and must chant, "armed people are also exploited," making reference to soldiers and police officers. Our position as Zapatistas is clear. We do not support pacifist flags that are raised fro someone else to turn the other cheek, nor violence that is encouraged when others provide the dead. We are who we are, with all the good and all the bad that we carry and is our responsibility. But it would be naive to think that all the good things we have accomplished - including the privilege of listing to and learning from you - would have been possible without preparing a full decade for the sun to rise as it rose on January 1, fifteen years ago.”
― Subcommandante Marcos

“As a child of Europeans, a woman whose families have spent many generations on these shores, some of them in relative material privilege, my culture raised me to compete for grades, for jobs, for money, for self-esteem. As my lungs breathed in competition, they breathed out the stale air of individualism, delivering the toxic message: You are on your own. Being "queer" only amplified the problem. Traveling across race and class and cultural boundaries, my ear eventually became tuned to different vibrations so that I began to hear, first as a murmur, then as clearly articulated sound: We... are... in... this... together. My lungs relaxed some, my chest gasped the clearer air.”
― Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor: Fighting Racism in the American South

“Most people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their relatedness to the places that formed them. 'When I rebuild the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself,' said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Night Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka, and New Orleans, the process deceptively called 'reconstruction' began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere and rooted communities, then quickly moving to replace them with a kind of corporate New Jerusalem - all before the victims of war or natural disaster were able to regroup and stake their claims to what was theirs.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“She didn't much care if it was or wasn't the musical portrait of the cellist, it's likely that he'd fabricated in his mind any alleged similarities, real or imagined, but what impressed death was that she seemed to hear in those fifty-eight seconds of music a rhythmical and melodic transposition of every and any human life, be it run-of-the-mill or extraordinary, because of its tragic brevity, its desperate intensity, and also because of that final chord, like an ellipsis left hanging in the air, something yet to be said. The cellist had fallen into one of the least forgivable of human sins, that of presumption, when he thought he could see his face, and his alone, in a portrait in which everyone could be found, a presumption which, however, if we think about it, if we choose not to remain on the surface of things, could equally be interpreted as a manifestation of its polar opposite, that is, of humility, since if it is a portrait of everyone, then I must be included in it too.”
― José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

“The other faction, far less visible or influential, arose in the marginalized communities, among women - Black, brown, queer, trans, poor, disabled - whom the state has never protected. These abolition feminists have learned from experience that prisons do not end violence, but rather perpetrate and perpetuate it, while destroying individual lives, families, and communities. Like a lot of their compatriots in the carceral feminist movement, many are themselves survivors of sexual harm. But, unlike the other contingent, their politics join the struggle against sexual and gender violence with that against the "white supremacist prison nation," to use the term coined by abolitionist scholar Beth E. Richie.”
― Judith Levine, The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Harm, Ending State Violence

“Similarly, there is a limit to how far you can go in anti-violence work without rejecting the principal institutions of masculine domination. In reaction to spates of accusations from enlisted women of sexual assault and harassment perpetrated by their male peers and officers, the US military has engaged trainers, including Katz, to conduct gender violence prevention and bystander intervention. Like the prevention of child abuse through the promotion of authoritarian fatherhood, anti-violence training with men whose job is to kill people - the epitome of toxic masculinity - is any oxymoron. These military projects also carry a strong whiff of Othering: soldiers should be respectful of "our" women, and even refrain from raping "enemy" women and girls, but it's okay to kill their fathers, brothers, or husbands and, if necessary, to blow up their homes and cities. These efforts are not working. Biannual Pentagon surveys show a stead increase in sexual assaults and harassment in military academies. "This isn't a blip, a #MeToo bump, or some accident," averred California Democrat Jackie Spier at a February 2019 House subcommittee hearing. "It's a clear illustration of a destructive trend and systemic problem.”
― Judith Levine, The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Harm, Ending State Violence

“To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.

Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.”
― Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory

“The first time I read As I Lay Dying, I was so awed I wanted to give up. I thought, "He's done it, perfectly. Why the hell am I trying?" But the failures of some of his black characters - the lack of imaginative vision regarding them, the way they don't display the full range of human emotion, how they fail to live fully on the page - work against that awe and goad me to write.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“Popular definitions of violence tend to include property destruction. But under these definitions, the destruction of property is usually viewed as violent only if it disrupts profit or the maintenance of wealth. If food is destroyed because it cannot be sold while people go hungry, that is not considered violent under the norms of capitalism. If a person's belongings are tossed on a sidewalk during an eviction and consequently destroyed, that is likewise not considered violent according to the norms of this society. Those destruct acts are part of the "order of things.”
― Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“We have to live collectively again, redefining contemporary political philosophy and revolutionary art. Perhaps the creative teams of friends, the affinity groups, the occupied parks, the squats and the social centers can become points for bringing alive all those dreams we lost in the selfishness of our small, insignificant, individual illusions. We may have to fight against many fears, traps, deeply rooted lies, psychological complexes, and insecurities. And then we will link our daily lives with the most magical secret desires to transform the streets of Metropolis in precious moments of freedom and happiness.”
― A.G. Schwarz, We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008

“Maybe we need to start thinking about how the world we would like to live in looks like. We must use moments and images of our present life that we want to expand and activate in all their significance. We don't need any science-fiction plan for our future. We have everything here and now. We have to liberate it all from the State and the market and share it. Revolution is when the society takes life in its hands and everything that is now merchandise again becomes a gift.”
― A.G. Schwarz, We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008

“Violence and Non-Violence are not identities or morals. The same people who fight against the police have the experience and knowledge to create a park, make non-confrontational political and social demos, write a book, sing a song, play with children on the playground. The same people who make art happenings and dance in front of the police with the drums and the puppets will fight back with molotovs and stones along with the Black Block when the police come closer, and they will help their comrades to escape. The same people whom you will meet behind the barricades are the people who will organize a grocery shop with organic vegetables and fruits from the anarchist farms, and all of them participated and will participate again together in the insurrection.”
― A.G. Schwarz, We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008

“Veneration for the past has always seemed to me reactionary. The right chooses to talk about the past because it prefers dead people: a quiet world, a quiet time. The powerful who legitimize their privileges by heredity cultivate nostalgia. History is studied as if we are visiting a museum; but this collection of mummies is a swindle. They lie to us about the past as they lie to us about the present: they mask the face of reality. They force the oppressed victims to absorb an alien, desiccated, sterile memory fabricated by the oppressor, so that they will resign themselves to a life that isn’t theirs as if it were the only one possible.”
― Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

“Work, beloved ones, work, for this is jihad... victory or martyrdom. We must make weapons, however simple, and strive to improve them everyday to increase their destructive power and range, and strike the enemy who possess all those military capabilities. Despite the simplicity of our weapons and our limited means, with God's help, we will create a new equation in the conflict, establishing a balance of terror and deterrence. They bombard us, so we bombard them. May God be pleased with Umar Ibn Al-Khattab, who said: "By God if I found nothing but dust, I would fight them with it." And we thank God, have much more than dust. We must fight them with everything we possess and always strive to enhance our capabilities.”
― Yahya Al-Sinwar, الشوك والقرنفل

“I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”
― Fidel Castro, History Will Absolve Me

“The Intifada had taught her some things, as was the case with every Palestinian. People learn a lot more from their own experience than they learn from propaganda and agitation.”
― Wisam Rafeedie, The Trinity of Fundamentals

“Meanwhile, the old fig tree stood in the middle of the field alone and naked, resisting the cold and the winds of winter while its solid trunk stood motionless like a tower, its roots burrowed deep in the earth. "Had I been an artist I would have painted a natural tableau of the white field and the fig tree," he told himself, contemplating the beauty of nature before him, focusing on the tree. "We are like you. You sink your roots in the ground, you absorb water from now till spring when its time for you to sprout leaves and bear fruit. You have to be patient for time to take its course. Like you , we have been sinking our roots into the soil of the people for years and years. We suck up the people's rich, revolutionary experience. One day our leaves will sprout and our fruit will bud. Everything is good in its time. Our people's wisdom says so. Look, our leaves have already started sprouting. The time will come for us to harvest the fruit of our revolutionary action, so that the workers and those struggling will rule over their homeland.”
― Wisam Rafeedie, The Trinity of Fundamentals

“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed