Quotes About Community

Once, at Thanksgiving, a neighbor wandered in while my cousin Lisa worked on a turkey, shearing meat off its frame and sliding the steaming slices onto a big flowered plate. 'Hey, that's the man's job,' she yelped, in between slurps of her Big Gulp. No one even paused to acknowledge the comment; everyone just laughed and laughed.

I am immensely blessed to be in America. This country has given me so much since I came here from Turkey as a teenager, and I feel obliged to give back to the community. I spent the summer crisscrossing the nation, holding 50 basketball camps for kids in 30 states.

My parents came from little, so they made a choice to give a lot: buying turkeys for homeless shelters at Thanksgiving, delivering meals to people in hospices, giving spare change to those asking for it.

Turkeys are perfect for feeding larger gatherings.

Personally, I've always been a philanthropist. I've always given away turkeys and did gift giveaways.

If Turkish or Moroccan boys misbehave here, it's up to us to re-educate them and, when necessary, to punish them.

We do not only have a Turkish side, inherited from our parents and our families, we were born and raised in Gelsenkirchen. It is a city with a high percentage of emigrants.

You still miss Turkish people, talking Turkish, you still miss your culture. That's why New York is the best place to be because everywhere you go there's Turkish people, your friends are here, you can go to eat Turkish food every day.

My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers - for instance, women with headscarves - but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives, and businesswomen.

Black lives certainly do matter - that's one thing. But, it's just that in every profession, there are bad, as well as there are good. I think it's wrong to make cops - or any group - out to be the enemy based on a generalization. Stigmas and generalizations about groups are what get this world into such turmoil.

The city is like a great house, and the house in its turn a small city.

Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.

At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this. It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in.

Our preoccupation has always been to craft space in such a way as to induce social interactions that would in turn generate a sense of community and a culture, but starting from the very immediate issue of how action influences perception.

You need the living, loving heart of living, loving men and women to quicken other hearts, which can live too and love too, and, in their turn, will quicken others which are dying now.

Back when people couldn't read, other people would take newspapers and turn them into theater so that people would know what was going on in the world. That is a powerful thing.

Being from Oakland, you see a lot of thing. You see friends turn on friends all the time. You see family turn on family.

It is time for us to turn to each other, not on each other.

If you're a pioneer and you come up with something that can change the world and you turn round and say 'I'm not going to share this idea with anyone,' then you only impact the few and not the many.

I recorded my first song at 15. But I started rhyming a few years before that. At first it was trading lyrics at school. We'd get in a circle in the playground with a beat-boxer and spit rhymes. Then it would turn into a big gathering after school.

Turn the preparing of food into a communal affair by enlisting others to help with the chopping, grating, stirring, simmering, tasting and seasoning. When the cooking is finished, eat together round the table with the electronic gadgets switched off so you can savor the food and let the conversation flow.

I would never turn my back on my fellow citizens.

I was given an incredible gift growing up in the Chelsea, a space where it is completely fine to be yourself - you just had to figure out what that was. You didn't have to figure that out in the face of opposition at every turn.

The biggest neurological turn-on for people is other people. This is what really excites us. In reward terms, it's not money; it's not being given cash - that's nice - it's doing stuff with our peers, watching us, collaborating with us.