Quotes About Community

Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people—we go on.

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die.

There are . . . no masses; there are only ways of seeing [other] people as masses.

One person with a belief is a social power equal to 99 who have only interests.

The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that… he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body.

Everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited, he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.

But the true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they freely concede to every one else; regarding command of any kind as an exceptional necessity, and in all cases a temporary one; and preferring, whenever possible, the society of those with whom leading and following can be alternate and reciprocal.

To prevent the weaker members of the community from being preyed upon by innumerable vultures, it was needful that there should be an animal of prey stronger than the rest, commissioned to keep them down. But as the king of vultures would be no less bent upon preying upon the flock than any of the minor harpies, it was indispensable to be in a perpetual attitude of defense against his beak and claws.

The aim, therefore, of patriots, was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty.

How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.

A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal.

That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His

In many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education—a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal.

aim, therefore, of patriots, was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty.

the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

The "people" who exercise the power, are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the "self-government" spoken of, is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest.

The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.

the object [which] ought to be principally aimed at ... is not the subversion of the system of individual property, but the improvement of it, and the full participation of every member of the community in its benefits

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

The researcher also discovered that as soon as a parishioner married a non-Pole (even if the spouse was Catholic) the rule was that "he must move out to a non-Polish Catholic parish.

The story is alternately hopeful and discouraging. Parish boundaries in the urban North served to foster communities of the sort admired by contemporary intellectuals at one historical moment, but proved unable to separate "community" from racial mythology at another. Parochial institutions strengthened individuals while occasionally becoming rallying points for bigotry. The extant literature on religion and race sidesteps this complexity.

meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found — in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends, and real communities are built