Quotes About Community

Harvard Square looked both new and familiar. I felt like I would have been able to tell just from looking that this configuration of buildings and streets was familiar and meaningful to lots of people, not just me. It was weird to visit a suburb that nobody else every visited or went to, and then to return to these widely known halls and buildings where famous statesmen and writers and scientists had been coming for hundreds of years.

Later we were at another party in a dorm. Why did all parties sound and smell the same, even though the component people were different? It was as if all the different individuals came together and formed the eternal entity Party Person.

Society will always be by your side. Society will let you die with no pity. Society is social suicide. Cold or hot in an untold wind, society folds the perfect creases to all four corners of a blanket we all lay under."

The Orthodox Church, as did the early Christians, does not separate the personal from the communal. We do not confuse "personal" with "individual." Our personal relationship with Jesus is anchored on our communal relationship to the Church as the nurturing and soul-sustaining Body of Christ.

We can consider our church attendance a failure if we do not experience this emotion.

after all these programs and scholarships, after all the work done by organized athletics at all levels, the number of boys actually playing baseball or football is far lower than before: no one is outdoors playing.

People who can organize themselves and accomplish something as devilishly complicated as a good ballgame are hard to herd around. They can form societies of their own. They become men and women, not human resources. They can be free.

Stereotypes are based on the idea that two heads are bigger than one.

The hermit is he who needs a friend, and in the absence of a community has befriended himself.

There is nothing wrong with being fascinated by the dark side of life, and ourselves, but woe to those who think this is representative of reality. All too many of us sit in our homes watching TV, falling prey to the delusion that the world is getting worse. If these sorry individuals spent more time meeting their neighbors, they'd discover that 95% of their peers are fine people.

The problem with growing up in a cafe was the cafe never closed, my parents worked every day of the year from morning to night. So it was a big menagerie of kids, business and cooking!

Britain's continuing membership of the Community would mean the end of Britain as a completely self-governing nation and the end of our democratically elected Parliament as the supreme law making body in the United Kingdom.

I think democracy is the most revolutionary thing in the world, because if you have power you use it to meet the needs of you and your community.

What befalls a trained soldier during combat between nations is one thing; what occurs at home—on our street, in our yard, and on our land, to family—is not the same. In Qana, those who died would not flee, would not leave their homes. That is what bayt means.

The gift of giving is to see the receiver give to someone else.

Domestic music-making has declined in recent years; but those who still engage in it know that making music together is an irreplaceable way of achieving closeness. The members of a string quartet sometimes develop a special intimacy which they claim is unmatched by any other relationship.

Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it.

There was no such thing as a private life, all lives were public.

When brothers agree, no fortress is so strong as their common life.

One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion. One is not just a man.

In giving you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude.

People haven't time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends.

To be a man is to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.

There is no hope of joy except in human relations.