Quotes About Community

created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were

Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one

neighborhood was filled with engineers from Hewlett-Packard, then as now one of

Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leaving entire streets of their old village abandoned. The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside connected to Bangor by a steep

The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.

applied for passports to America, leaving entire streets of their old village abandoned. The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside connected to Bangor by a steep, rutted wagon path. They built closely clustered

In other words, in all of the city of Colorado Springs-a town of well in excess of 100,000 people-the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basically frequenting the same six bars.

In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes:

The whole Mennonite philosophy is that we forgive and we move on." To the Mennonites, forgiveness is a religious imperative: Forgive those who trespass against you. But

This is an epidemic theory of crime. It says that crime is contagious—just as a fashion trend is contagious —that it can start with a broken window and spread to an entire community.

Throughout the majority of human history, encounters—hostile or otherwise—were rarely between strangers.

fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans. If you had wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian, and not just any Italian but the precise southern

The Rosetons were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills…The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with has a profound effect on who we are.

Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky — but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.

MacCurdy argued that when a bomb falls, it divides the affected population into three groups. The first group is the people killed. They are the ones for whom the experience of the bombing is—obviously—the most devastating. But as MacCurdy pointed out (perhaps a bit callously), "the morale of the community depends on the reaction of the survivors, so from that point of view, the killed do not matter.

though? Not something expensive or impossible to find; not something encoded in DNA or hardwired into the circuits of their brains. They lacked something that could have been given to them if we'd only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly

Some of them may have children in nearby schools, and grocery stores where they shop, and friends they like to be close to, and parents they need to look in on—and as a result have all kinds of reasons not to move their business. Their job, at that moment, is sex work. But they are mothers and daughters and friends and citizens first. Coupling forces us to see the stranger in her full ambiguity and complexity.

To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society.

In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they

his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They gathered together the death certificates from residents of

Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages