Quotes About Community

The century's getting old and stale; it needs new tribes.

If anybody questions you, just say you're friends of the Bayou Kid. That's what some people call me around here. Except for my old fishing pal, Tom Straight, the bartender. He still calls me by my given name.

This Haida fisherman was in the john when his friends unknowingly left him behind. Please see that he gets to the dock before the fishing fleet departs. C. Cussler Chief Forman

The council works for the best interest of the whole. Decisions from past councils are weighed to carefully consider the effect of any new proposal, following the self-governing tenets of the Cherokee Indian tribe in eastern America, which made no decision until the effects of that decision were considered for seven generations into the future. The Gathering itself is a participatory workshop in self-government.

I do not believe that any form of lasting community can exist where people do not share the same sense of what is just and what is not just.

Shawnees moved so often and dispersed so widely that they sometimes seemed like a people without a homeland of their own.

In the biracial world constructed in nineteenth-century North America, people had to choose sides; more often the choice was made for them.

The Midland Midwest would develop as a center of moderation and tolerance, where people of many faiths and ethnicities lived side by side, largely minding their own business.

The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.

Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. ... Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.

The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race--which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wished for ourselves and our children?

You can change the law but you can't change people and how they treat each other. Nickel was racist as hell—half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends—but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color. It was Spencer. It was Spencer and it was Griff and it was all the parents who let their children wind up here. It was people.

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.

New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

To think of those Nickel nights where the only sounds were tears and insects, how you could sleep in a room crammed with sixty boys and still understand that you were the only person on earth. Everybody and nobody around at the same time. Here everybody was around and by some miracle you didn't want to wring their neck but give them a hug.

The only currency to satisfy the debt was their survival and to help others when circumstances permitted.

Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams.

She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it. If

sometimes laughter knocked out a few bricks from the barricade of segregation, so tall and so wide.

Before I came back to North Carolina, I'd never seen a mob rip a man limb from limb," Martin said. "See that, you stop saying what folks will do and what they won't." True

Royal joined the singing to change the subject and to remind her that there were things a body could feel good about. A community that had come together, from seeding to harvest to the bee. But the song was a work song Cora knew from the cotton rows, drawing her back to the Randall cruelties and making her heart thud. Connelly used to start the song as a signal to go back to picking after a whipping. how could such a bitter thing become a means of pleasure?

He felt unreal those days of the riots when his streets were made strange by violence. Despite what America saw on the news, only a fraction of the community had picked up bricks and bats and kerosene. The devastation had been nothing compared to what lay before him now, but if you bottled the rage and hope and fury of all the people of Harlem and made it into a bomb, the results would look something like this.

scattered parkgoers. Cora hunkered and

Black hands built the White House, the seat of our nation's government. The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race—which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for ourselves and our children?