quotations about community
When the individual feels, the community reels.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
Community [is] a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to "rejoice together, mourn together," and to "delight in each other, make others' conditions our own."
M. SCOTT PECK
The Different Drum
The brotherhood of the community is indeed the ground in which the individual is ethically realized. But the community is the frustration as well as the realization of individual life. Its collective egotism is an offense to his conscience; its institutional injustices negate the ideal of justice; and such brotherhood as it achieves is limited by ethnic and geographic boundaries.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
The Nature and Destiny of Man
The mark of a community is that one's life may be lived wholly within it. One cannot live wholly within a tribe or a city. The basic criterion of community then is that all of one's social relationships may be found within it.
BASAVANTHAPPA
Community Health Nursing
In the blackness of the night
I seem to wander endlessly
With a hope burning out deep inside
I'm a fugitive, community has driven me out
For this bad, bad world I'm beginning to doubt
I'm alone and there is no one by my side
CAT STEVENS
"Blackness of the Night"
A community is only a theory existing in the minds of men; it is not a fact, as some would have us believe, for such things as common rights and common privileges do not exist.
G. J. HOLYOAKE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Community is a manifestation of God in the world, a picture on Earth of a divine relationship.
HEIDI CAMPBELL
Exploring Religious Community Online
Only through the group, I realised -- through sharing the suffering of the group -- could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death -- which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.
YUKIO MISHIMA
Sun and Steel
Community is and must be inclusive. The great enemy of community is exclusivity. Groups that exclude others because they are poor or doubters or divorced or sinners or of some different race or nationality are not communities; they are cliques--actually defensive bastions against community.
M. SCOTT PECK
The Different Drum
Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Studies in Classic American Literature
The forces of power, particularly corporate power, are impatient with what is adequate for a coherent community. Because power gains so little from community in the short run, it does not hesitate to destroy community for the long run.
WES JACKSON
Becoming Native to This Place
Man is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude. He combines with other men because isolation endangers him, and because there are many things that can be done better together than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against the world.
WILL DURANT
The Story of Civilization
It feels good to be in a community. Community, above all, is bigger than individuals--we are something much more than individuals when we are part of a community. And this is how things ought to be.
TONY BLACKSHAW
Key Concepts in Community Studies
The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.
TONY KUSHNER
Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness
Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village."
DAVID JAMES DUNCAN
God Laughs and Plays
Better homes and safety-sealed communities
Did you remember to pay the utilities?
Caution: police line: you better not cross
Is the cop or am I the one that's
Really dangerous?
GREEN DAY
"Warning"
The essence of community, its heart and soul, is the non-monetary exchange of value; things we do and share because we care for others, and for the good of the place.
DEE HOCK
One from Many
Creating sustainable community is like moving into a home with unique, lovely features and regularly maintaining that home. The home has certain features that attracted us. Rather than allowing those features to deteriorate, we polish them. We prevent them from getting damaged. We repair our home on a regular maintenance schedule. Our home, though, is our town, our nation, or the planet Earth.
PAMELA D. COUTURE
Child Poverty: Love, Justice, and Social Responsibility
The community protects and shares out of caring; love is never far away.
PETER ABRAHAMS
The Black Experience in the 20th Century
Membership in a community, as in a family, is involuntary. One is born into a community, and although one may leave it, the community's influence is not so easily left behind.
LARRY W. JOHNSTON
Politics (Canadian Edition): An Introduction to the Modern Democratic State