Quotes About Unity

Free speech is a sign of a strong first-person plural, which enables people who disagree over fundamental things to live together in a condition of mutual toleration.

The wars of the twentieth century brought home the fundamental truth that people will fight for their country and unite in its defence, but will seldom fight for their class, even when the intellectuals are egging them on. At

I have argued that the political process, as we in Western democracies have inherited it, depends upon citizenship, which in turn depends upon a viable first-person plural. And in the previous chapter I gave what to me are incontrovertible arguments for construing that first-person plural in national terms. No such first-person plural can emerge in a society divided against itself, in which local antagonisms and class war eclipse every understanding of a shared destiny.

Political order, in short, requires cultural unity, something that politics itself can never provide.

Unless and until people identify themselves with the country, its territory and its cultural inheritance – in something like the way people identify themselves with a family – the politics of compromise will not emerge.

Beneath every society where self-interest pays off, lies a foundation of self-sacrifice.

In short, freedom belongs to individuals only by virtue of their membership in the 'we'.

Unless and until people identify themselves with the country, its territory and its cultural inheritance – in something like the way people identify themselves with a family – the politics of compromise will not emerge. We

We have to take our neighbours seriously, as people with an equal claim to protection, for whom we might be required, in moments of crisis, to face mortal danger. We do this because we believe ourselves to belong together in a shared home. The

There are none of you, good doctors, could cope with my family anyway.

First, a man may in some ways be superior to his fellows and still serve them, if together they serve a common cause which is greater than any one man. I believe that I serve such a cause, or I would not be doing it.

The Nameless, of which we are all a part, does dream form. And what is the highest attribute any form may possess? It is beauty. The Nameless, then, is an artist.

Fiona and Brand had reached beyond everything and found something, where none of the rest of us had believed anything to exist. The danger released was, on some level, almost worth the evidence obtained: we were not alone, nor were shadows truly our toys.

we avoided their swarms by putting one foot in front of another without pause and making noises of our own. We didn't step on anybody who squashed.

No sense in looking for our differences when I had just met him.

We were more alike than we were different, he and I.

The whole quilt is much more important than any single square.

And, in any case, the idea of independence was a fantasy. Everyone depended on someone.

Marriage is like death, only happens once.

Isolation and competition are inhospitable to learning.

Now take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight, and cast it entire into a single man - all this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak.

The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.

The gift is contact, sensuality: you will be touching what I have touched, a third skin unites us.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.