Quotes About Community

To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one's group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups.

Ah, sahib. I know you just come to comfort a old man left to live by hisself. Soomintra say I too old-fashion. And Leela, she always by you. Why you don't sit down, sahib? It ain't dirty. Is just how it does look.' Ganesh didn't sit down. 'Ramlogan, I come to buy over your taxis.

We heard of ambushes on roads we knew, of villages attacked, of headmen and officials killed. It was at this time that Mahesh said something which I remembered. It wasn't the kind of thing I was expecting from him - so careful of his looks and clothes, so spoiled, so obsessed with his lovely wife. Mahesh said to me: What do you do? You live here, and you ask that? You do what we all do. You carry on.

I don't know why they still building houses, Mr Biswas said. Nobody don't want a house these days. They just want a coal barrel. One coal barrel for one person. Whenever a baby born just get another coal barrel. You wouldn't see any houses anywhere then. Just a yard with five or six coal barrels standing up in two or three rows.

And how are you, Ferdinand? You don't have to ask. You mustn't think it's bad just for you. It's bad for everybody. That's the terrible thing. It's bad for Prosper, bad for the man they gave your shop to, bad for everybody. Nobody's going anywhere.

In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city we pursue, in vain.

They'd all known each other long enough to forgive each other's faults, to accept each other's politics and to say what would be unsayable in any other company.

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind'.

Brutal crimes didn't spring from nowhere; their seeds lay in the wider crimes of the community they impinged on.

Just as we help our children expand their vocabularies by reading to them and engaging them in conversations, we expand our vocabularies of prayer by making other people's prayers our own. Hymnals, denominational prayer books, and books of prayers from Christian people in all cultures and time periods can enrich our own prayer lives as we hear new ways of expressing old needs or experience a fresh perspective of how to pray for a situation.

Throughout the years, I have observed that participants who voluntarily become involved in unofficial dialogues with the enemy are seen to some degree as traitors by those in their own community who are against all communication with the enemy. These participants may also experience shame for talking with the enemy, which is intensified if and when the enemy carries out some violent act while the talks are going on.

There was bread enough for us in the army, on the front line. We were fed by the Russian people. And no one had to teach them how to do it." "You're right there," said the economist. "What matters is that we're Russians. Yes, Russians—that's quite something." The inspector smiled and winked at his companion. It was as if he were saying those well-known words: "The Russian is the elder brother, the first among equals.

If everyone had two little apple trees like this, I believe there'd be no need for wars. Fascism would be impotent. These knobbly little branches are like honest arms and hands. They could save the world from war, savagery and disaster.

The strength and good sense of the people, their morality, their true wealth—all this will live forever, no matter how hard fascism tries to destroy it.

The body needs food, but the mind needs people

In those days, leaving the old behind in times of starvation was not an unknown act, although in this band it was happening for the first time.

All the chief knew for sure was that in hard times The People should hold together, and last winter they had not done so. They had inflicted an injustice on themselves and the two old women, and he knew that The People had suffered silently since that day.

Finding the women alive would give The People a second chance and that, perhaps, was what he hoped for most.

the migrating bands in these times preserved hot coals in hardened mooseskin sacks or birchbark containers filled with ash in which the embers pulsated, ready to spark the next campfire.

Oh, that most helpless and shameful of times in the life of my people, the time from dawn until the liquor stores open up!

Saturday was general cleaning day in accordance with the rules laid down by the Foundress. Every nun, professed or lay, scrubbed down her cell, took her linen to the laundry room, made up her narrow bed with fresh sheets and changed her underwear for the second time in a week.

Explain to me, if you will, why alcoholism is a disease but can only be treated by attending little spiritual meetings in basements.

Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating custom and tradition as by breaking laws.

The clever globe-trotting fox learns many things about the world, the local burrowing hedgehog only one: the essential truth that people are people, and learning how to understand and serve them begins at home with those one sees and speaks with face to face.