Quotes About Community

sharing information was the key to survival.

Fired up by the punk explosion, they wrote their first song—"Storming Tarragona." Named after the down-at-heel housing development where Boon lived, the song was about tearing down the projects and building real houses for people to live in. Boon and Watt, it turned out, had a powerful populist streak. "D. Boon didn't think our dads got a fair shake," Watt says, "and I think he was kind of railing against that ever since.

Music can bind people in weird ways—socially, information—a lot of people get everything they know from songs and groups.

Hardcore's organizational energy was just as important as its musical energy—

Relationships are currency, something Sonic Youth had picked up on not only from the art world but from the camaraderie of the SST bands.

The bands of the I.P.U. had created their own movement simply by assiduously seeking each other out and pooling resources and information.

So they decided to make their own culture

that was the record that extended what so many people had felt and been a part of, and extended it to people who had never thought those thoughts before, or thought to be a part of something like that before.

Everybody likes the idea that there's this burgeoning, happening scene somewhere in the world.

You're advertising the fact that there's a community here—it's not just this industry that's manufacturing bands, it's a happening scene where people are feeding off each other.

MacKaye had been drawn to punk partly because it provided a community framework for his outsider thinking. "I've always been enthralled by gangs and communes, any collection of people where it's a family kind of thing

Being Palestinian," I said, "means never having to say you're sorry.

A banal mysticism, which is so banal that all the mysticism seems to have evaporated long ago, binds 'us' to the homeland - that special place which is more than a place, more than a geophysical area.

I write it, you read it, we share the joy.

All of the Nordic countries have high levels of trust, but the Danes are the most trusting people on the planet. In a 2011 survey by the OECD, 88.3 percent of Danes expressed a high level of trust in others, more than any other nationality (the next places on the list were filled by Norway, Finland, and Sweden, respectively, and the United States was way down in twenty-first place out of thirty countries surveyed).

the Popsicle Index, which ranks countries according to the percentage of people in a community who believe that their children can safely leave their home, walk to the nearest possible location to buy a popsicle, and walk back home again.

Someone once told me his idea for surviving a crash of civilization was to be a lone wolf, heading for the hills, with his rifle and knife, living off the land. Nowadays, I'm more interested in staying behind and helping others, he said, like after Hurricane Katrina. Coming together and rebuilding something that can last. How about BEFORE a disaster? I asked. Even better.

Crabtree's father was a Pentecostalist preacher somewhere out in Hogscrotum County, MO, and his mother was the editor-in-chief of a magazine for knitting-machine enthusiasts. 'She can make you anything,' went a favorite line of his. 'She made me a queer.' He had been lost to the clutch of Satan since early adolescence and hadn't seen them in years.

They weren't my family and it wasn't my holiday, but I was orphaned and an atheist and I would take what I could get.

Even the most casual study of the record...would show that strange times to be a Jew have almost always been, as well, strange times to be a chicken.

The odd agglomeration of Warshaws, the product of a long and determined program of overseas adoptions, with its combination of Jews and Koreans, intellectuals, space cadets, and sharpies, no two of them related by blood, seemed to offer me the best chance yet to wire my wandering meteor to the armillary sphere of a family.

The fathers were standing around in their baseball caps, in a knot, smoking and talking. They looked over at Kohn's van, trying to identify it. Many of them would have known each other all their lives. On this field they would have tormented the chubby, the bespectacled goat of their generation. Their sons sat clumped along the bench like pigeons on the arm of a statue.

The Filipino-style Chinese donut, or shtekeleh, is the great contribution of the District of Sitka to the food lovers of the world. In its present form, it cannot be found in the Philippines. No Chinese trenchermen would recognize it as the fruit of his native fry kettles. Like the storm god Yahweh of Sumeria, the shtekeleh was not invented by the Jews, but the world would sport neither the God not the shtekeleh without Jews and their desires.

From the time he'd moved to Florida in the mid-Seventies, the available women of Fontana Village had been giving my grandfather their best shot.