Derrick Jensen Agency Quotations

But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to "hope" at all. We simply do the work.