Choosing hopefulness is holding out the possibility of change. It’s living with one foot in the mud and muck of the world as it is, while another foot strides forward toward a world that could be. Hope is never a matter of sitting down and waiting patiently; hope is nourished in action, and it assumes that we are—each and all of us—incomplete as human beings…. We can choose to see life as infused with the capacity to cherish happiness, to respect evidence and argument and reason, to uphold integrity, and to imagine a world more loving, more peaceful, more joyous, and more just than the one we were given—and we should.

Excerpt from Demand the Impossible: A Radical Manifesto by Bill Ayers, Haymarket Books, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2016.

---

Bill Ayers is a social justice activist, teacher, and a retired distinguished professor of education and senior university scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of two memoirs, Fugitive Days and Public Enemy.