Quotes About Community

A national survey ongoing since 1974 has shown that Americans have never been less likely to be friends with their neighbors as they are now. The lowest levels of neighborliness were recorded in the suburbs.33

Writing often in the pages of the New York Times, Allison Arieff is a powerful spokesperson. "Bring back the sidewalk!" she urged in one of her articles, explaining: "Community is born from social routine—running into neighbors at the mailbox or while walking down the street. Design for these serendipitous encounters."8

the way coupling is envisioned in contemporary American society is not universal, it is not timeless, and it is not human nature. Instead, the reigning American worldview may well represent one of the narrowest construals of intimacy ever imagined. Where once the tendrils of love and affection reached out to family, friends, and community, reached back to ancestors, and reached up to the heavens, now they surround and squeeze just one other person—sometimes to the point of asphyxiation.

In one of the buildings where April lived, the girls befriended the kids who lived upstairs. "At first it was nice; but other times, it just felt like every time we got home, they were knocking on the door. And it stopped having that sort of safe-haven feeling to it.

the relationship that I think is the most significant one in twenty-first-century American life: it is friendship. The

Life is constant change, and nowhere is this more marked than in a village which used to be a centre of work and is now largely an escape from it.

Let us suffer absurdities, for this is only to suffer one another.

I love solitude, but I prize it most when plenty of company is available.

Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.

What you've made here is a complete neighborhood." Pauline mused. "You might live in it without ever needing to leave it for anything, couldn't you?

My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.

For a certain generation of African immigrants cleaning offices became part of the culture like male circumcision and supporting Arsenal.

Or as my dad always says: it only becomes a social problem when the working man joins in.

God bless busybody community matriarchs, and all that sail in them.

If you ask any copper why they stick at a job which exposes them to abuse from everyone from petty criminals all the way down to government ministers, they'll say it's the variety.

We decided to go back to basics and put the frighteners on some snouts." "Really?" "We adopted a proactive intelligence-gathering policy utilising appropriate stakeholders in the community and pre-established covert human intelligence sources. "And nobody can put a frightener on a covert human quite like Lesley can.

says: it only becomes a social problem when the working man joins in.

The problem is that Americans would like to be independent of the rest of the world ... Except the world ain't that way. Trying to be independent of the rest of the world is to commit suicide.

you can live somewhere for years, and your neighbours will only ever hear you as a newcomer, but go home and your friends say, Oh you' ve got such an accent . . . But

Hannah's Oberlin friends, a gaggle of food-co-op-looking people, came up and hugged me one by one.

We are all interconnected and interdependent, and because of this, we are all only as rich as we enrich those around us. I

When we carry a safety net made of cash, we allow the one made of community to slip through our fingers.

And the whole town just stood there crying, Looking at the darkness, For something wholesome and good

books also connect us to all others - of our own or previous times - who have read what we've read. In the community of readers, we instantly become linked to those who share our love for specific characters or passages.