Quotes About Community

Look to the ant, thou sluggard; Consider her ways and be wise: Which having no chief, overseer, or ruler, Provides her meat in the summer, And gathers her food in the harvest. —PROVERBS 6:6–8

where small niches can flourish.

From the very beginnings of human settlements, figuring out where to put all the excrement has been just as important as figuring out how to build shelter or town squares or marketplaces.

The glassmakers had brought a new source of wealth to Venice, but they had also brought the less appealing habit of burning down the neighborhood.

Formal city parks have a longevity to them that can exceed that of castles or cemeteries or forts.

we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

Most hotbeds of innovation have similar physical spaces associated with them: the Homebrew Computing Club in Silicon Valley; Freud's Wednesday salon at 19 Berggasse; the eighteenth-century English coffeehouse. All these spaces were, in their own smaller-scale fashion, emergent platforms.

With that increase in population came a crucial increase in the number of possible connections that could be formed within the group. Good ideas could more readily find their way into other brains and take root there. New forms of collaboration became possible.

When the first market towns emerged in Italy, they didn't magically create some higher-level group consciousness. They simply widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they're connected to the network.

Amazingly, life went on largely undisturbed as Chesbrough's team raised the city's buildings. One British visitor observed a 750-ton hotel being lifted, and described the surreal experience in a letter: "The people were in [the hotel] all the time coming and going, eating and sleeping—the whole business of the hotel proceeding without interruption

Lion was the one who pointed out that naming hotels after Millennial values -- the Truth, the Purpose, the Community -- now that his generation had reached the age where the luxury of billboard ethics had been derailed by the verities of life, might be lucrative. Aspirational nostalgia, he dubbed it.

All you can do is your inch. We grab everyone we can carry, put each other onto our backs, and crawl toward the future. Inch by inch—it's all we can do.

For if I am interesting to you precisely to the extent that I'm not one of you, then your desire to civilize me, to turn me into a good citizen of Nuremberg, can lead to nothing but loss of interest.

Long after the children had dispersed, they avidly exchanged books and reading recommendations as if no book was truly read until all had read it.

company. To move in any good circle, even one as

The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs, at least not if you want them to listen to you. You can't say that my interests are special compared to yours any more than you can say that the particular spot that I am standing on is a unique part of the universe because I happen to be standing on it that very minute.

Unlike features of a landscape like trees and mountains, people have feet. They move to places where opportunities are best, and they soon invite their friends and relatives to join them.

The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs.

Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.

We have been spiritually impoverished, they say, by the rise of individualism, materialism, consumerism, and decadent wealth, and by the erosion of traditional communities with their hearty social bonds and their sense of meaning and purpose bestowed by religion.

Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent's television ads as "soft on crime" and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. A

The reason to believe that many polysemous meanings are memorized, rather than stretched as the need arises, is that they are conventional—they are arbitrary practices of a language community, neither deducible nor universal.

One of the most impressive civilizing offensives of the 1990s came from African American communities, who set themselves the task of recivilizing their young men. As with the pacifying of the American West a century before, much of the moral energy came from women and the church.

Violent crime is a solvable problem.