A Quote by Rahel Varnhagen
Hope for forces which you do not yet have. That is what is most impossible, and nevertheless possible.
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Most of the crackpot papers which are submitted to The Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published. When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer himself it will be only half-understood; to everybody else it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.
Most of the papers which are submitted to the Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published.
I chose as the campaign logo a blue rose, which means 'make possible the impossible.' I think the British with Brexit, then the Americans with the election of Donald Trump, did that: They made possible the impossible.
I think it's impossible to predict the future but it is possible to look at the past and see how one can do differently from what one's ancestors have done and learn from their mistakes, and one can see how even though there are enormous forces which stop one doing what one wants to, there are little holes in which the individual can do something.
What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings? The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things.
Hope is such a tenuous quality. To feel it and then to be denied what one most longs for ... Better, surely, not to hope at all, than to open the heart to a hope that is impossible.
What's possible exceeds what's impossible. Think about it. Do all you can do that is possible today, and in your tomorrow, what was impossible will be possible.
The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.
Extinction has only separated groups: it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear, though it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group could be distinguished from other groups, as all would blend together by steps as fine as those between the finest existing varieties, nevertheless a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible.
To not have any hope is where things start to get really bleak. Things are possible. The impossible can be possible.
Hope makes the impossible possible.
We must recognize that we are living in an imperfect world in which human and superhuman forces of evil are at work and so long as those forces affect the political behaviour of mankind there can be no hope of abiding peace.
Extraordinary people visualize not what is possible or probable, but rather what is impossible. And by visualizing the impossible, they begin to see it as possible.
In a democratic society, as Max Weber said, what is possible is only possible because some people have demanded the impossible. The abolitionists helped to create a public discourse in which men like Lincoln become possible. That doesn't mean Lincoln is an abolitionist. It means there is a public opinion out there which is being influenced by antislavery sentiment.
Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it's something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.
Hope for forces which you do not yet have.
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