Quotes About Community

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

When trouble comes, close ranks

Los derechos humanos deberían ser la base de la comunidad internacional. Fijan las normas mínimas en virtud de las cuales hombres procedentes de horizontes diferentes pueden encontrarse, reconocerse y hablarse.

It's at moment of misfortune that we remember we're all exiles.

Ordinary French people. Citizens of fear.

Her library is a meeting place for all who love books. They discuss matters of the world and matters of the spirit.

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.... I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape -- but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community -- to society?

I did not realize that when money becomes a core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.

That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

I am not a fan of supermarkets and I hate shopping there, even for things I can't get elsewhere, like cat food and bin bags. A big part of my dislike of them is the loss of vivid life. The dull apathy of existence now isn't just boring jobs and boring TV; it is the loss of vivid life on the streets; the gossip, the encounters, the heaving messy noise that made room for everyone, money or not.

Whelks are strange and comforting. They have no notion of community life and they breed very quietly. But they have a strong sense of personal dignity. Even lying face down in a tray of vinegar there is something noble about a whelk. Which cannot be said for everybody.

Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.

Bridges join but they also separate.

I guess I'm afraid of not being like other people. No, that's not true. I'm not afraid of not being like other people. I'm afraid I won't find anybody who doesn't mind me not being like other people. I'm not ambitious for money or power. I want to find some real way to live.

I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.

I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.

Christmas is about community, collaboration, celebration. Done right, Christmas can be an antidote to the Me First mentality that has rebranded capitalism as neo-liberalism. The shopping mall isn't our true home, nor is it a public space, though, as libraries, parks, playgrounds, museums and sports facilities disappear, for many the fake friendliness of the mall is the only public space left, apart from the streets

I go to the bathroom. All my life I have been an orphan and an only child. Now I come from a big noisy family who go ballroom dancing and live forever.

you act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you.

El centro comercial no es nuestro verdadero hogar, ni un espacio público, aunque, a medida que desaparecen las librerías, los jardines, los parques, los museos y los polideportivos, la falsa amabilidad de los centros comerciales sea el único espacio que queda para muchos, aparte de las calles.

I saw a lot of working class men and women - myself included - living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the church... The sense of belonging to something big, something important, lent unity and meaning.

Bombay. Cairo. Paris. New York. I've been to those places now. The curious thing is that no matter how different they are, people are all preoccupied with the same things, that is, the same thing; how to live. We have to eat, we want to make money, but in every pause the question returns: How shall I live?