Quotes About Belonging

But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.

The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.

If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism [us-versus-them thinking] and turn up the sense of common humanity.

Among the most important such innovations is the human love of using symbolic markers to show our group memberships. From the tattoos and face piercings used among Amazonian tribes through the male circumcision required of Jews to the tattoos and facial piercings used by punks in the United Kingdom, human beings take extraordinary, costly, and sometimes painful steps to make their bodies advertise their group memberships

Gods and religions, in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust. Like maypoles and beehives, they are created by the members of the group, and they then organize the activity of the group. Group-level adaptations, as Williams noted, imply a selection process operating at the group level.

Our politics is groupish, not selfish.

a modern version of the muscular bonding that Ehrenreich and McNeill had described. The scene and the experience awed him, shut down his "I," and merged him into a giant "we.

But even those who reject all religions cannot shake the basic religious psychology of figure 11.2: doing linked to believing linked to belonging.

Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness) and wrote, in 1897, that "man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.

No man, woman or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can't be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people.

When the "tribe switch"30 is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group's moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves.

Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.

found a way to forge a sense of "we" that extended beyond kinship. We trust and cooperate more readily with people who look and sound like us.69 We expect them to share our values and norms.

man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him.

We humans have a dual nature - we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves.

Social norms are the cement that holds societies together.

We are who we are in relation to others.

Nice to know I'm among friends...Shame none of 'em are mine.

I'm not a Jew. I'm Jew-ish. I don't go the whole hog.

I'm not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.

My dad is the kind of dad who tried to eliminate himself. My dad's story is all too common, because when we don't fit in, many of us believe we shouldn't exist, and we try, as my dad did, as I did, to disappear.

You don't have no idea who you are. And if you don't know who you are," Polly continued, "you can't know nothing about where you beee-long.

Creation is filled with soul-sick folks, colored and white, never knowing where they belong. They tangle everybody else up in their grief.

social connectedness can go a long way toward alleviating the misery caused by a financial crisis.