Quotes About Community

It may be, in the end, that a good society is defined more by how people treat strangers than by how they treat those they know.

When he was unexpectedly elevated to the executive director's position in 1942, Tobin quickly instilled at the Port Authority a disciplined, hierarchical, but deeply communitarian ethos designed to serve not power but a higher moral purpose.

By the late nineteenth century the dazzlingly multiethnic character of the now great metropolis echoed the diverse origins of its earliest European explorers, but only one group knew the port as their place. For if the port made New York, the Irish made the port.

As a veteran journalist who covered both sides of the waterfront once remarked, had a path been paved across the Hudson, Chelsea and Hoboken would have made one neighborhood.

Between Hell's Kitchen and Greenwich Village lay Chelsea, the heart and soul of the Irish waterfront.

1940s Jersey City childhood, "I grew up thinking America was an Italian country governed by the

The ubiquity of alcoholism in Chelsea and neighboring Irish waterfront communities can scarcely be overstated:

It then became obvious that ethnic differences (like class distinctions) refused to boil away. Even fairly well established groups, such as Irish-Americans, often nursed old resentments and clung to neighborhood enclaves.

Only later did other scholars, notably Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan in their perceptive book Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), highlight the enduring power that ethnic identifications—what one eats, who one marries, where one lives, how one votes—had in the lives of the American people.53

In life, telling a joke will make another person smile. This causes people to be happy and happy people release chemicals into their bloodstream which make them healthier. Happy people then tell jokes to others. This circular process improves the well-being of communities and helps bond people together.

It appeared that these private schools, while operating as businesses, also provided philanthropy to their communities. The owners were explicit about this. They were businesspeople, true, but they also wanted to be viewed as "social workers," giving something back to their communities. They wanted to be respected as well as successful.

The primary movement in the text is not from unity to differentiation, but from the isolation of an individual to the deep blessing of shared kinship and community.

what mattered most, as I came to realize, was who'd lived in Vegas the longest, which was why the knock-down Mexican beauties and itinerant construction heirs sat alone at lunch while the bland, middling children of local realtors and car dealers were the cheerleaders and class presidents, the unchallenged elite of the school.

Let's think about this, shall we? Without goals, we aren't motivated, are we? Without goals, we're not financially prosperous! Without goals, we can't achieve what Christ wants for us as Christians and members of the community!" Harriet, he noticed with a bit of a start, was glaring at him rather aggressively.

Everything was bathed in a celestial light. I listened to Jack and Lars talk about pinball, motorcycles, female kick-boxing, and was heartwarmed at their attempts to include me in the conversation. Lars offered me a bong hit. The gesture was, to me, tremendously touching and all of a sudden I realized I had been wrong about these people. These were good people, common people; the salt of the earth; people whom I should count myself fortunate to know.

In recent years they had fallen in with a gabby, childless couple, older than they were, called the MacNatts. Mr. MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs. MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon. They had got my parents doing things like taking bus trips to factory outlets and playing a dice game called "bunko" and hanging around the piano bar at the Ramada Inn.

In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.

And for the first time, I smiled, and everybody else smiled back.

America was a special country, because, despite the diversity of our racial, religious, and ethnic origins, we were all one nation, one people with a shared set of values and a common culture.

The surest way to be happy," Eleanor wrote in an essay at school, "is to seek happiness for others.

I thereby learned the invaluable lesson that in the practical activities of life no man can render the highest service unless he can act in combination with his fellows, which means a certain amount of give-and-take between him and them.

There is no one left; none but all of us.

private citizens were asked to open their homes;

There is no one left," McClure exhorted his readers as he cast about for a remedy to America's woes at the turn of the twentieth century, "none but all of us.