“We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.”

—  Neil Gaiman

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. I…" by Neil Gaiman?
Neil Gaiman photo
Neil Gaiman 108
English fantasy writer 1960

Related quotes

Neil Gaiman photo

“Make ethical choices in what we buy, do, and watch. In a consumer-driven society our individual choices, used collectively for the good of animals and nature, can change the world faster than laws.”

Marc Bekoff (1945) American biologist

Source: Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect

N. K. Jemisin photo

“When people questioned this, the priests simply said, The world has changed. We must change with it.
You can imagine how well that went over.”

Source: The Broken Kingdoms (2011), Chapter 4 “Frustration” (watercolor) (p. 60)

Neil Gaiman photo
Ervin László photo
Eleanor Roosevelt photo

“It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Source: You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

Ellen Willis photo

“Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"Three Elegies for Susan Sontag", New Politics (Summer 2005), Vol. X, No. 3 http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue39/Willis39.htm
Context: Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is likely, all unwittingly, to do the opposite, for bearing witness is lonely: it breeds feelings of superiority and moralistic anger against those who are not doing the same.

Related topics