Quotes About Community

founding principles is e pluribus unum, or "unity in diversity

The idea that a corporation should bear no responsibility to anything other than the financial bottom line of its stockholders destroys the

social fabric of our society as well as the natural environment on which all business, and indeed all life, depends.

Just like a sunbeam can't separate itself from the sun, and a wave can't separate itself from the ocean, we can't separate ourselves from one another.

If you legitimize their self-centeredness, they'll be more likely to forget about their ancestors, their fellow citizens, or their descendants.

Give all your gifts away in service to the world.  If you want to paint, don't wait for a grant, paint a wall in your town that looks drab and uninviting.  You never know who is going to see that wall. Whatever it is you want to do, give it away in service to your community.

The key, very simply, is other people.

I've learned that health and healing come more from love and respect, for oneself and others, than from any specific therapeutic technique. The potential for self-healing and healing from within, both for individuals and communities, is a resource too often overlooked. (xiii)

Very few of us lack superficial faults and we must rely on each other's kindness to overlook them.

But people take such trouble with their faults and go to such lengths to make them fascinating to others that it is really very unkind to overlook them,' protested Sidney. 'They would much rather be laughed at on their own merits than politely ignored as members of a community.

That was just the means by which he would be totally and constantly surrounded by Black people; and it was the means by which they would all know his name.

It wasn't enough for Teddy to know that his family could not be counted in the statistics of poverty—among those who did not rely on government subsidies of any kind: they went to work; they owned their own home; their sons did not go to jail; their daughters got married before they got pregnant; there were few drug addicts and alcoholics among them—and those who succumbed did so in the privacy of their homes and not on the street disgracing everybody.

Caring for language is a moral issue. Caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. We need to take the metaphor of nourishment seriously in choosing what we feed on in our hearts, and in seeking to make our conversation with each other life-giving.

When we converse, we act together toward a common end, and we act upon one another. Indeed, conversation is a form of activism - a political enterprise in the largest and oldest sense - a way of building sustaining community.

Agate, population 70, is one of those towns that people describe as 'blink and you'll miss it.' Lois A. Engel loved living in the blink.

Rejoice with those who rejoice. I have found that difficult too often. I was much better at weeping with those who weep.

Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

When we accept dismissive judgments of our community we stop having generous hope for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.

Your mother goes to the public library, which has been down on its luck for a long time, like most things around here. Last time she brought back a copy of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine that was worn ragged, all held together with tape. She just sank into it, though, she just melted into it.

That reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind that we are able to do for each other in the ordinary cause of things.

In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I'd try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot, since many of the ones who weren't mine were Boughton's. And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they didn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams.

In the First Epistle of Peter we are told to honor everyone, and I have never been in a situation where I felt this instruction was inappropriate. When we accept dismissive judgements of our community we stop having generous hopes for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.

Perhaps, pious as they were, these ladies did not wish to see me pass into that sad and outcast state of revelation where one begins to feel superior to one's neighbors.