Quotes About Community

We do not ask for wealth because he that has health and children will also have wealth. We do not pray to have money but to have more kinsmen. We are better than animals because we have kinsmen. An animal rubs its itching flank against a tree, a man asks his kinsman to scratch him.

Ogbuef Ezedudu,who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men when they came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan. It has not always been so, he said. My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. but after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.

Our humanity is contingent on the humanity of our fellows. No person or group can be human alone. We rise above the animal together, or not at all. If we learned that lesson even this late in the day, we would have taken a truly millennial step forward.

villages that their leaders came together to save themselves.

Have you not heard that when two brothers fight a stranger reaps the harvest?

He who brings kola brings life.

had said at the reconciliation meeting, that anger against a kinsman was felt in the flesh, not in the marrow

Our people say that if you thank a man for what he has done he will have strength to do more.

Un hombre pertenece a la tierra de su padre cuando todo va bien y la vida es agradable. Pero cuando hay penas y amargura se refugia en la tierra de su madre. Tu madre está aquí para protegerte.

Dicen nuestros mayores que el sol ha de alumbrar antes a los que están de pie que a los que se arrodillan bajo ellos.

The Igbo are a very democratic people. The Igbo people expressed a strong antimonarchy sentiment—Ezebuilo—which literally means, a king is an enemy.

That night the Mother of the Spirits walked the length and breadth of the clan, weeping for her murdered son. It was a terrible night. Not even the oldest man in Umuofia had ever heard such a strange and fearful sound, and it was never to be heard again. It seemed as if the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evil that was coming—its own death.

He forgot the saying of the elders that if a man sought for a companion who acted entirely like himself he would live in solitude.

And besides do not our people say that he is a fool who treats his brother worse than a stranger?

Did not our elders tell us that as soon as we shake hands with a leper he will want an embrace?

The real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.

2470 He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

Even after most cultures established monetary economies, day-to-day transactions within close-knit social groups, from families to tribes, was still mostly without price. The currencies of generosity, trust, goodwill, reputation, and equitable exchange still dominate the goods and services of the family, the neighborhood, and even within the workplace. In general, no cash is required among friends.

In short, we're seeing a shift from mass culture to massively parallel culture.

When you think about it, the hyperlink is the ultimate act of generosity online. When somebody links to another site, what they're doing is telling their readers to go elsewhere.

Whatever Microsoft product you use or have an interest in, there's an engineer or product manager carrying on a conversation in public about it.

In the 1950s and 1960s, it was a safe assumption that nearly everyone in your office had watched the same thing the previous night.

only peer production has the capacity to extend as far as the Long Tail can go.

But every effort to make this work in practice at any scale failed, largely because the social bonds that police such mutual aid tend to fray when the size of the group exceeds 150 (termed the "Dunbar number"—the empirically observed limit at which the members of a human community can maintain strong links with one another).