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…. 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.

Rebecca Solnit in the Foreword to the Third Edition (2015) from Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, published by Haymarket Books, Illinois, USA, 2016. First published by Nation Books, USA, 2004.

Rebecca Solnit, born in 1961 in Connecticut/USA, is a writer, historian, and activist. She is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, hope and disaster. An independent writer since 1988, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub. Her most recent book, Recollections of My Non-Existence, was released in March 2020.