Quotes About Community

One must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.

the difference between a small local business that must share the fate of the local community and a large absentee corporation that is set up to escape the fate of the local community by ruining the local community.

It just seemed that, as we waited together for the coming of this life, it had become wrong to sit apart.

Kindness is not a word much at home in current political and religious speech, but it is a rich word and a necessary one. There is good reason to think that we cannot live without it. Kind is obviously related to kin, but also to race and to nature. In the Middle Ages kind and nature were synonyms. Equal, in the famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence, could be well translated by these terms: All men are created kin, or of a kind, or of the same race or nature.

He would get up in the midst of the crowded shop, interrupting the conversation, and start outside to relieve himself. "All who can't swim, mount the highest bench," he would cry out, "for the great he-elephant will now make water!

In the coal counties, east and west, they were strip-mining without respect for the past or mercy to the future, and the reign of a compunctionless national economy was established everywhere.

strewn with wildflowers and overhead were making shade. Everybody was busy about the fields and plant beds and gardens. The season had made its claim. And then there came a day of brittle-feeling showers driven over the town by a cold wind that, after the warm days, seemed to come through your clothes in slices.

Because I have never separated myself from my home neighborhood, I cannot identify myself to myself apart from it. I am fairly literally flesh of its flesh. It is present in me, and to me, wherever I go. This

And then Andy told him about Meikelberger's farm. Had Isaac ever thought of buying more land – say, a neighbor's farm? Well, if I did I've have to go in debt to buy it, and to farm it. It would be more time and help than I've got. And I'd lose my neighbor. You'd rather have your neighbor? We're supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves. We try. If you need them, it helps.

We'd been living at Grandpa's for a little more than a year when Mrs. Crandel died. And the next day Kate Helen Branch had a baby. Uncle Burley said that was just the way things were. They put one in and pull another one out.

People are making careful, comely, dignified work of the essential tasks defined by modern values as "drudgery." And because they have thought of the well-being of all the people, all are busy. There is a use for everyone. The Amish do not have the abandoned children, cast-off old people, criminals, indigents, and vagrants whom we have "freed from drudgery." And

It might prove out to be," Athey said, "that if we can't live together we can't live at all. Did you ever think about that?

An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.

I lost no time, of course, in telling him about the book I wanted to write. Not, by then, to my surprise, he readily understood what I had in mind and what my needs and problems were going to be. Our talk was not only thoroughly enjoyable and immediately useful; it was also an immense relief. If it was possible for a person of my loyalties and convictions to find one friend and ally, it might be possible to find others. Apparently I was not as odd as I had feared.

But if nobody can ever quite be nothing to you in Port William, then everybody finally has got to be something to you.

The more local and settled the culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert.

A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.

Big Ellis giggled. "We heard you were dead, Burley." "So did I," Uncle Burley said. "But I knew it was a lie as soon as I heard it.

If Cecelia was my enemy, that was because (as I now believe) she saw me as her enemy. As the town's barber, as the host of that mostly masculine enclosure, the barbershop, and as the town's permanent bachelor, a piece of raw material permanently raw, forever to be unimproved by a woman of her discriminating powers, I must have seemed to her to be the very gatekeeper of that unregulated other world that Roy eased away into whenever he eased away.

No matter what laws or governments say, men can only know and come to care for one another by meeting face to face, arduously, and by the willing loss of comfort.

If we are serious about these big problems, we have got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves. Thus we put an end to our habit of oversimplification. If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we ourselves must be prepared to become poorer. If

One of the best days of the year, for me, was Decoration Day, when people would come from near and far with flowers to decorate the graves. Besides being beautiful and fragrant with all the roses and peonies and boughs of mock orange, it was a kind of grace and benediction, and a kind of homecoming. I liked to make a show of being busy in the graveyard so I could watch and listen.

What is called the morality of a society is no more than a consequence of the morality of individuals. There is, by the same token, no such thing as a purely private morality, for the morals of private citizens are public in effect, and are increasingly so.

Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.