Quotes About Community

If you don't look after your fellow man, if you think that what you want is always more important than what anyone else wants or needs, you're not human, and that's that. There is no virtue in selfishness, not one bit.

We know that Valdemar is not the land—and it is not just the people. Valdemar is a spirit, a community of spirit that binds a hundred disparate peoples with a hundred different religions and ways of life into a company and a greater whole. It is not a unity, for that would be denying our diversity, and in our diversity and our tolerance is our strength.

The malignancy of divisiveness, given the chance to creep deeper, would rot us. You need to truly consider that your neighbor's beliefs are as valid as yours and not disparage or impair those beliefs.

Witch' is just a religion, okay? No baby-sacrificing, no Black Masses, no sending imps out to scare the dog-snot out of kids, trying to make them think they're crazy. We don't do things like that. Our number-one law is 'Have fun in this lifetime, but don't hurt anybody.'" Nice little paraphrase of "An it harm none, do as ye will," if I do say so myself.

Ordinary folks, a muddle in the middle, just trying to get by with the least amount of pain and the greatest amount of joy. He could not argue with that.

It's amazing how many people will care about you if only you would care about them, and It's even more remarkable how many people will care about you anyway

The lives of the Outer Dwellers had become almost normal again. Bitterness was their bread and rivalry their wine.

In fact I was not alone in doing this. Almost everyone cried, but we all learned to hide it, and those who didn't were the ones who got bullied.

After the prescribed length of time and number of meals consumed and digested in unison, they felt they had sufficient community of interests to marry.

To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.

Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.

Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.

All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like..I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don't challenge ourselves to actually practice.

For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don't have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community.

As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another's voices, in recognizing one another's presence.

Queer' not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.

As more people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work harder to divide and conquer.

Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.

Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment. Self-love cannot flourish in isolation.

Our freedom is sweet. It will be sweeter when we are all free.

Fluidity means that our black identities are constantly changing as we respond to circumstances in our families and communities of origin, and as we interact with a wider world.

When we black people commit ourselves to living simply as a political action, as a way of breaking the stress caused by unrelenting hedonistic desire for material objects that are not needed for survival, or essential to well-being, we will not be talking about ebonics. We will be out in the streets demanding that the public schools have enough teachers so that all kids, cross color, can read and write in standard English and in Spanish too.

No level of individual self-actualization alone can sustain the marginalized and oppressed. We must be linked to collective struggle, to communities of resistance that move us outward, into the world.

One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends.