"Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, then watching the evidence change."
— Jim Wallis, Faith Work

"Hope . . . which whispered from Pandora's box only after all the other Plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things."
— Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, The Rule of Four

"We bang and bang on the door of hope, and don't anyone dare suggest there's nobody home."
— Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonders

"Every time people say yes to life in whatever form — the unborn life, life on death row, the life of the severely handicapped, the life of the broken and the homeless — they start to give hope to each other. . . . This hope can form a very strong bond among people who are willing to go where life is fragile and hidden."
— Henri Nouwen, The Road to Peace: Writings on Peace and Justice

"One can only hope that our uniquely human qualities of adaptiveness, ingenuity, and opportunism will carry us through an uncertain and challenging future."
— Brian Fagan, The Great Warming

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out."
— Vaklav Havel

"Hope is one of our duties . . . part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants."
— Wendell Berry

"Optimism is the belief that things will turn out well; but sad to say, the objective facts give little reason to expect that humanity will avoid environmental suicide. Hope, on the other hand, is an active, determined conviction that is rooted in the spirit, chosen by the heart, and guided by the mind. . . . Hope is the foundation of action."
— Mark Hertsgaard, quoted in The Impossible Will Take a Little While, ed. Paul Rogat Loeb

"Hope, unlike optimism, is rooted in unalloyed reality. . . . Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see — in the individual's eye — a path to a better future. Hope acknowledges the significant obstacles and deep pitfalls along that path. True hope has no room for delusion."
— Jerome Groopman, The Anatomy of Hope

"The word 'hope' does not necessarily mean feeling reassured that all is well. Hope is more like figuring out, from a very black pit, where the ladder to the far-away light at the top is. It's coming to a realistic understanding of how things really work, so that we finally know what we're dealing with, and therefore where to begin."
— David Suzuki and Holly Dressel, Good News for a Change