Quotes About Community

The sustainable city has got to promise more happiness than the status quo. It has got to be healthier, higher in status, more fun, and more resilient than the dispersed city.

1950s nuclear family,

In his other great treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued that human conscience comes from social relationships, and that the natural empathy produced by being among other people is an essential part of well-being and should guide our actions.

each of us benefits when some of us subsume private goals for the sake of the community, and everyone benefits when everyone cooperates. As the oxytocin studies illustrate, our brains reward us for working well together.

shaped people's behavior by inviting them to come together and to linger.

Activity in human life is the greatest attraction in cities.

Another big mistake came with well-meaning efforts to deal with salient dangers such as house fires. Before World War II, the typical residential street in the United States and Canada was only twenty-eight feet wide. If cars were parked on either side, two drivers approaching each other in the middle could barely pass.

Trust is the bedrock on which cities grow and thrive. Modern metropolitan cities depend on our ability to think beyond the family and tribe and to trust the people who look, dress, and act nothing like us to treat us fairly, to honor commitments and contracts, to consider our well-being along with their own, and, most of all, to make sacrifices for the general good. Collective problems such as pollution and climate change demand collective responses. Civilization is a shared project.

There is a message for all city makers here. It is that with the right triangulation, even the ugliest of places can be infused with the warmth that turns strangers into familiars by giving us enough reason to slow down.

The city is a means to a way of life. It can be a reflection of all our best selves. It can be whatever we want it to be. It can change, and change dramatically.

A study of Los Angeles revealed that people who live in areas with more parks are more helpful and trusting than people who don't, regardless of their income or race. Nature is not merely

You cannot separate the social life of urban spaces from the velocity of the activities happening there.

Most people's root networks are closing in on themselves, circling more and more tightly around spouses, partners, parents and kids. These are our most important relationships, but every arborist knows that a tree with a small root-ball is more likely to fall over when the wind blows.

The city that acknowledges and celebrates our common fate, that opens doors to empathy and cooperation, will help us tackle the great challenges of this century.

It means living closer together and sharing more spaces, walls, and vehicles. It means collecting experiences rather than objects.

But, like the man in the song, Alfred Roberts did well by doing good. The shop prospered.

It used to be that parents didn't have to be home. If a neighbor so I child misbehaving, it was considered appropriate for the neighbor to intervene. The parents would be grateful when they found out, and they would take the word of the neighbor if the child protested his innocence. Unmarried and divorced parents tend not to behave that way. Instead, they tend to try to be the good guy to their children.

paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience—much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens.

He is certainly not a good citizen who does not wish to promote, by every means in his power, the welfare of the whole society of his fellow citizens." That is Adam Smith talking, the apostle of laissez-faire.

The strangers we encounter on the web are abstractions, not a physical presence—we are interfacing with them, not interacting.

Four American traits were central to the evolution of that culture: industriousness, egalitarianism, religiosity, and an amalgam of philanthropy and volunteerism that was uniquely American.

Instead of feeling sorry for the exceptionally able student who has no one to talk to, we need to worry about what happens when the exceptionally able students hang out only with one another.

The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.

The genius of free human beings is that, given responsibility, they join together to take care of each other—to be their brothers' keepers when their brother needs help. The triumph of an earlier America was that it had set all the right trends in motion, at a time when the world was first coming out of millennia of poverty into an era of plenty. The tragedy of contemporary America is that it abandoned that course. Libertarians want to return to it.