The best way to resist a monolithic institution or corporation is not with a monolithic movement but with multiplicity itself.(Ch.18) - P99
The answer to most either/or questions is both; the best response to a paradox is to embrace both sides instead of cutting off one or the other for the sake of coherence. - P96
It can be the small in opposition to the big: Arundhati Roy writes of "the dismantling of the Big—big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small."(Ch.18) - P99
So this other globalization, the globalization of communication and of ideas, can be the antithesis of the homogenization and consolidation brought by the spread of chains and brands and corporations. - P99
Decentralization and direct democracy could, in one definition, be this politic in which people are producers, possessed of power and vision, in an unfinished world. - P100
Thus, remembering the past became the grounds to make change in the present.
Thus, culture becomes politics.
In the end, the day did not commemorate the start of an era but marked in some subtle way the beginning of its end.(Ch.19) - P101
Spain had planted the idea of the quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival, but indigenous-rights activists would reshape it into an antithesis of Spain’s agenda. - P102
Columbus Day became an occasion to rethink the past, and rethinking the past opened the way to a different future. - P102
The quincentennial became an opportunity to restate what Columbus’s arrival had meant—invasion, colonialism, genocide—and what it had been met with—"Five hundred years of resistance" was the catch-phrase. - P103
From being a dying race, the indigenous peoples of the Americas have become a growing force. - P105
On April 1, 1999, the Inuit got their homeland
back. They won from the Canadian government their own autono- mously governed province, Nunavut, a huge tract of far northeastern land three times the size of Texas, ten times the size of Britain, a fifth of all Canada. - P105
This resurgence also demonstrates the sidelong ways of change: from an argument in Geneva to a land mass in northern Canada, from a critique of the past to a new path into the future, from ideas and words to land and power. This is how history is made, out of such unlikely materials, and of hope.(Ch.19) - P106
This won’t yield any rapid results, but like polar ice, the old alignments are falling apart, and this time the breakup is liberatory, a birth into the utter unknown of a brave new world. - P108
"The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think,"
said Virginia Woolf in the midst of the First World War, a war in which millions of young men died horribly.
They died, but not everything did.
Woolf committed suicide during the next war, but before that she created a body of work of extraordinary beauty and power, power put to use by women to liberate themselves in the years after Woolf was gone, beauty still setting minds on fire. - P108
Someday all this may be ruins over which pelicans will fly, but for now it is a place where history is still unfolding. Today is also the day of creation. - P114
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