Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

Without imagination, I don't think there's any progress.

Let's say there are prospects for a new Nigeria, but I don't think we have a new Nigeria yet.

I think that science fiction has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that idea.

It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.

Before we can build the world we want to live in, we have to imagine it.

For better or worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity.

The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change; Then let it come: I have no dread of what Is called for by the instinct of mankind. Nor think I that God's world would fall apart Because we tear a parchment more or less. Truth is eternal, but her effluence, With endless change, is fitted to the hour; Her mirror is turned forward, to reflect The promise of the future, not the past. I do not fear to follow out the truth.

If the people of Comic-Con ruled the world...then tomorrow would be invented every day.

The real radical is that person who has a vision of equality and is willing to do those things that will bring reality closer to that vision. . .

Everything great that ever happened in this world happened first in somebody’s imagination.

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.

The world would never amount to a hill of beans if people didn't use their imaginations to think of the impossible.

You gotta imagine what's never been.

I just don't feel that we've traveled very far in the realm of social equality. There just seems to be a little bit of unrest. And sometimes I think that happens when you really feel like something's about to change. Right before the moment of lift off, sometimes things feel a little bit unhinged, and that's what it feels like to me right now, both as a woman and just as a human on the planet as an American woman in America. I feel like we're on the precipice of change. I feel a little nervous.

We should be building great things that don't exist.

The aim of human rights, if I may borrow a term from engineering, is to move beyond the design and drawing-board phase, to move beyond thinking and talking about the foundations stones - to laying those foundation stones, inch by inch, together.

I consider non-violence to be compassion in action. It doesn’t mean weakness, cowering in fear, or simply doing nothing. It is to act without violence, motivated by compassion, recognising the rights of others.

I think we're in a very exciting time - visually, I think we are. I've not got a crystal ball. I'm not saying I know what the future is at all. In some ways I'm getting quite pessimistic about the future, but in other ways I think it might get better. We are moving into very big changes.

Science is progressing at such a rapid rate that when you make a prediction and think you are ahead of your time by 100 years you may be ahead of your time by 10 at most.

Let's go invent tomorrow...

At every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different

Looking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future.

The social revolution...cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all superstitions concerning the past.

I hope the day will never come when the American nation will be the champion of the status quo. Once that happens, we shall have forfeited, and rightly forfeited, the support of the unsatisfied, of those who are the victims of inevitable imperfections, of those who, young in years or spirit, believe that they can make a better world and of those who dream dreams and want to make their dreams to come true.

Above all, being a Democrat means having compassion for others. ... It means standing up for people who have been kept down.