“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.”

“Because I feel as if I let it down. As if it needed something from me, I was its only hope, and now that hope is gone.''What penis doesn’t try to make you feel that way?”

“You have to open up to the world and learn optimism...Contentment with the past, happiness with the present, and hope for the future. Learned optimisim.”

“You don't have to be in your later quarter of life to benefit from a future time perspective. Unplugging yourself from the present and projecting your dreams into the future can help you reach fulfillment at any age.”

“....hope is 'that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future.' ...hope is our positive orientation toward the future, a future in which we simultaneously recognize difficulty, responsibility, and delight. Hope is not relative to the present situation, nor is it dependent upon a specific outcome... Hope is not an antidote to despair, or a sidestepping of difficulty, but a companion to all these things.”