Quotes About Community

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." —EDMUND BURKE

God is not the possession of any religion. If anything, religion can be a path away from God. God cannot be bound up inside churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Those are just community centers where people gather to hang out with their friends. God is no more to be found in those places than he is in rock clubs or back-alley bars. God is in the wilderness, and God is in the city. Everywhere you go God is there. God walks with you. God is you, and God is the very act of walking.

Buddhism started not when Shakyamuni had his great revelation by himself. Lots of people had done that before. It began when he made his first efforts to transform that into a communal practice. Buddhism, then, is not something you do by yourself.

You can do zazen by yourself. You do Zen Buddhism with other people.

To me Zen is a communal practice of individual deep inquiry.

I grew up in a very old-fashioned Roman Catholic, Italian-Irish family in Philly.

That's why I wanted to be part of this AIDS Project Los Angeles party. We help raise funds for those who are having a tough time with some very basic necessities, like shelter, food, and medical care.

Julie, Mia and I just met for a couple days, doing some work but really under the guise of having fun. We do events like the Women's Sports Foundation Dinner, where we get to not only do a good thing for the community but we get to hang out with one another again.

All of us are heaven-sent, and there was never meant to be only one.

We are the human family, together we are ONE. We're here to lift one another up, not tear each other down.

Margaret Crawford, "The World in a Shopping Mall," in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Noonday Press, 1992), p.

sharing a book with others becomes a public enterprise. There

Help thy brother's boat across, and lo, thine own has reached the shore.

You will find that hate can unify people more quickly and more fervently than devotion ever could.

Oh, don't worry. If you didn't say some stupid things every once in a while, you certainly wouldn't fit in with this group.

Damn, I miss the internet. You could always find people doing stupid stuff on the internet.

Remember why we live. Remember warmth, remember good food. Remember friends, and song, and evenings spent around the hearth.

In the land where everyone screams, everyone is also slightly deaf.

The world ends tomorrow, but the day after that, people are going to ask what's for breakfast.

For the men chatting together softly, the change was in being shown sunlight again. In being reminded that the darkness DID pass. But perhaps most important, the change was in not merely knowing that you weren't alone — but in FEELING it. Realizing that no matter how isolated you thought you were, no matter how often your brain told you terrible things, there WERE others who understood.

The law is there to keep us from ruining everyone else's ability to explore. Without law, there's no freedom.

The world's gone mad: joining it is the only solution.

Leniency and mercy. Men set free despite crimes, because they were good fathers, or well liked in the community, or in the favor of someone important. "Some of those who are set free change their lives and go on to produce for society. Others recidivate and create great tragedies. The thing is, Szeth son Neturo, we humans are terrible at spotting which will be which. The purpose of the law is so we do not have to choose. So our native sentimentality will not harm us.

But I still wondered: if we didn't matter as individuals, then what were we saving the group for?