revolution takes root in your imagination

(...) the change that counts is revolution takes place first in the imagination. Histories usually pick up when the action begins (...). This means, of course, that the most foundational change of all, the one from which all else issues, is hardest to track. It means that politics arises out of the spread of ideas and the shaping of imaginations. It means that symbolic and cultural acts have real political power. And it means that the changes that count take place not merely onstage as action but in the minds of those who are again and again pictures only as audience or bystanders. The revolution that counts is the one that taes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden - which is to say that revolution doesn't necessarily look like revolution. 

- Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit (2004)