Quotes About Community

Except to the insane narrow-mindedness of industrial economics, selfishness does not pay.

Every community needs to learn how much of the local land is locally owned, and how much is available for local needs and uses.

Oh Lord, make us able To eat all that's on this table, And if there's some we haven't got Bring it to us while it's hot

That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated. We all, in the course of our daily economic life, consent to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our economic sources in the land, the land-communities, and the land-use economies.

When the industrial colonialists and the politicians agree to sacrifice a region to a single economic goal, they inevitably sacrifice the people as well.

Wheeler served them as their defender against the law itself, before which they were ciphers, and so felt themselves—and he could do this only as their friend.

No longer does human life rise from the earth like a pyramid, broadly and considerately founded upon its own sources. Now it scatters itself out in a reckless horizontal sprawl, like a disorderly city whose suburbs and pavements destroy the fields.

That computers are expected to become as common as TV sets in "the future" does not impress me or matter to me. I do not own a TV set. I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.

Farming by the measure of nature, which is to say the nature of the particular place, means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love.

At every point in our food economy, present conditions remaining, we must expect to come to a time when demand (for quantity or quality) going up will meet the culture coming down. The fact is that we have nearly destroyed American farming, and in the process have nearly destroyed our country. from the essay Nature As Measure

wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves . .

Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.

And so there is the Territory of self-righteousness. It is easy to assume that we do not participate in what we are not in the presence of. But if we are members of a society, we participate, willy-nilly, in its evils.

He turned to his own place then . . . and began to ask what might be the best use of it. How might a family live there without reducing it?

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't. Burley Coulter

And in the fields and the town, walking, standing, or sitting under the trees, resting and talking together in the peace of a sabbath profound and bright, are people of such beauty that he weeps to see them. He sees that these are the membership of one another and of the place and of the song or light in which they live and move.

It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help.

The old complex life, at once economic and social, was fairly coherent and self-sustaining because each community was focused upon its own local countryside and upon its own people, their needs, and their work. That life is now almost entirely gone. It has been replaced by the dispersed lives of dispersed individuals, commuting and consuming, scattering in every direction every morning, returning at night only to their screens and carryout meals.

The conversation thus established was a poor thing, Tol knew, so far as his own participation in it went, but it was something to go on. It gave him hope. And now I want to tell youhow this courtship, conducted for so long in secret in Tol's mind alone, became public. This is the story of Miss Minnie's first consent, the beginning of their story together, which is one of the dear possessions of the history of Port William.

A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with.

The interstate cut through farms. It divided neighbor from neighbor. It made distant what had been close, and close what had been distant.

Categorical hatred is the hatred of the mob, which makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob overflowing with righteousness, as at the crucifixion, and before, and since.

I have pondered for years and I still can't connect Port William and war except by death and suffering. No more can I think of Port William and the United States in the same thought. A nation is an idea, and Port William is not. Maybe there is no live connection between a little place and a big idea. I think there is not.

My old friend, Gene Logsdon, who's a fine writer on agriculture, and lately a novelist, once asked an Amish factory owner, "Do you have a toxic effluent from your factory?" And the owner looked at him in horror. He said, "Our children play around this factory." If you had a local slaughterhouse patronized by local people, who could watch the slaughtering and butchering of their own animals, you wouldn't need the government to inspect for sanitation.