Quotes About Community

If you reveal TMI, it can make people feel a little less alone.

Such a leader knows how to empower groups to self-organize. When it's done right, a governance structure by consensus naturally emerges, as happened both with Linux and Wikipedia. "What astonishes so many people is that the open source model actually works," Torvalds said. "People know who has been active and who they can trust, and it just happens.

Ward Cunningham's wiki software.

Ideas are often generated in physical gathering places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously. That is why Steve Jobs liked his buildings to have a central atrium and why the young Benjamin Franklin founded a club where the most interesting people of Philadelphia would gather every Friday.

Whenever peace – conceived as the avoidance of war – has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community. Whenever the international order has acknowledged that certain principles could not be compromised even for the sake of peace, stability based on an equilibrium of forces was at least conceivable.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being

Franklin and, by extension, the Junto were particularly fond of things that could help the public as well as themselves.

The love of those who have not learned to stand solitude, or who "invite a witness when [they] wish to speak well of" themselves is not a virtue but simply a weakness; nor do they profit their neighbors.

I sensed that almost all of them knew they didn't have much more time on earth. Maybe this accounted for their willingness to pitch in with strangers and form a neighborhood.

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

Two of the deacons were just boys. I guess they had to join a gang one way or another, and the church won out.

I always talk about down home like it really was home. Like everybody who looked like me and talked like me really cared about me. I knew that life was hard, but I hoped that if someone stole from me it would be because they were hungry and needed it. But some people will tear you down just to see you fall. They'll do it even if your loss is their own.

A culture is a total way of life. It embraces what people ate and what they wore; the way they walked and the way they talked; the manner in which they treated death and greeted the newborn. Obviously

Numerous reports attest to the hospitality of African communities. Within any village or chiefdom, the codes of hospitality and a spirit of charity prevented the extremes of poverty and abandonment which one finds in richer and supposedly more mature societies.

The black intellectual, the black academic, must attach himself to the activity of the black masses.

All white people are enemies until proved otherwise, and this applies to black intellectuals, all of us are enemies to the people until we prove otherwise.

mercy to a criminal may be gross injustice to the community.

This polarization has an unmistakably global dimension to it. Even in the small towns where folks bicker with one another about how to run the schools, the local issues and rivalries are overshadowed by a general feeling that all social orders—definitely including small-town America—are being drawn into something much larger.

Money is Like Cow Poop, it Does No Good Unless You Spread It Around

with others, are likely to experience such a year.

Gentrification had stopped dead several doors west of my spot overlooking Avenue B. You could actually see the line. That side of the line; Biafran cuisine, sparkling plastic secure window units, women called Imogen and Saffron, men called Josh and Morgan. My side of the line; crack whores, burned-out cars, bullets stuck in door frames, and men called Father-Eating Bastard. It's almost a point of honour to live near a crackhouse, like living in a pre-Rudy Zone, a piece of Old New York.

Ain't no Jesus in Snowtown, Detective.

Straight people are so fucking weird.

Rough week, right? Listen, every book in your home is one of us saying to you, please hold on until the end. We want you to stay with us so we can all see, together, how it all turns out. You're not alone. One of us is with you all the time. Hold on tight. See you next week.