We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success.

Led by Communist organizers, mobs roamed the streets shouting “We’re hungry. Steal what you will!” The nation was hopelessly in debt with no way to repay.

You are always hoping that movie audiences are interested in characters and interested in story values rather than just mindless special effects. But you never know.

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn’t hold a stillborn aspiration. I’d want to have it, to make it, to live it.

No matter how dark and hopeless a situation might seem, never stop praying.

I didn’t really want to live, so anything that was an investment in time made me angry… but also I just felt sad. When the hopelessness is hurting you, it’s the fixtures and fittings that finish you off.

What I’m asking for is hard. It’s easier to be cynical; to accept that change isn’t possible, and politics is hopeless, and to believe that our voices and actions don’t matter. But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future.