Quotes About Community

Sometimes a bus ride was all it took to feel better.

Are people the only holy land?

But I know we need to keep warm here on earth And when your shawl is as thin as mine is, you tell stories.

We will take this word in our arms. It will be small and breathing. We will not wish to scare it. Pressing lips to the edge of each syllable. Nothing else will save us now. The word "together" wants to live in every house.

She was thinking about prejudice, how it might begin so simply-- they come from elsewhere, they don't look the way I do. Why did people want to match? And here they were in the great multicultural city of the first African-American but also half-white U.S. president in history.

But female fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, women's bodies are not our own but society's, and that thinness us not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community. A cultural cixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

As a child, you sat in a circle around your teacher and looked at her face as she read a story, and you felt the magic of human narrative in a collective context.

If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community. As long as women are asked to bring a self-denying mentality to the communal table, it will never be round, men and women seated together; but the same traditional hierarchical dais, with a folding table for women at the foot.

And I wondered why there were no studies of communities that did not "lock down" — communities in which people chose their own levels of risk while providing support to those who wished to "isolate" or who wanted to protect their own, more vulnerable immune systems while others made different choices. I wondered why no one wanted to know what was becoming of them.

I said tensely to the rabbis on that call, "If I were a rabbi and someone wanted to pray with me, I would meet with them in a bus shelter." Soon thereafter the rabbis let me know I that was not a "good fit" for the congregation. My congregation essentially broke up with me, and returned to me my membership dues.

By January 2021, in the Hudson Valley, there was no Jewish or Episcopal or Catholic community anymore. There was no home. Whoever had hated our belief, and the strength it gave us — whoever had wanted our faith communities to die out — had won.

But suddenly, it was ok — indeed, it was "necessary" — to provide no school for the kids. To offer no community college or university for the young adults. Because, because . . . COVID. Parents all over were praying that kids could go back to school in the fall of 2020. They did not know that decisions were already being made, above their heads.

This is the reason why a favorite buzzword in tech CEO circles is "disruptive." The primary thing every digital company wants to "disrupt" is a human society from which they are not profiting. The more that tech platforms and policies are able to shut down human community, and restrict the freedom of humans, the wealthier the Big Tech corporations become.

But my husband and I were not reassured by the Nurse Ratched–type comforting language, and we were astonished at Governor Cuomo's dicta. Since we had both lived in war zones and conflict areas, we knew that commerce was never closed, even in the worst crises. People needed to keep making their livings in order to survive the crisis, and the economy needed to be sustained in order for the community to survive the crisis.

Their aim was to construct engines of history designed to dissolve human culture, closeness and community. United in an alliance of convenience, these forces see human beings and the troublesome individualistic West, with its stubborn insistence on human rights, on joy, on spontaneity, on quirkiness, acceptance, and tolerance, as obstacles to be managed, drained of power and resources, and sidelined.

Both went from having been part of America to being coerced into another culture, having been forced over the next two years into another dimension of human experience, with another political system and a completely different, grotesquely lesser, set of options for human life and community.

It was bizarre to see the expectation that mothers-to-be must be "masked" as they were in labor. Everyone in the birthing community teaches the critical importance of breathing correctly, for safe births. That well-documented central belief was dropped by the right-on obstetric and doula community overnight.

It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.

Mohammed had invited the Jews and Christians to join him; for he was not building a new religion. He was calling all who believed in one God to join in a single faith.

During times of disaster sorrow brings people together in a spirit of friendship, and influences man to recognize the blessings of becoming his brother's keeper.

The world will forgive you if you make mistakes, but it will never forgive you if you make no DECISIONS, because it will never hear of you outside of the community in which you live.

You will find happiness only by helping others to find it.

The free schools of America, and the free public libraries, do not impress people because they are free.

Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders: