Quotes About Community

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

loneliness is not a function of solitude.

Our leaders, our government is us, all of us, so if they're venal and weak it's because we are.

Surely we all dealt with and reconciled ourselves to a life many of whose features were out of our control. It was part of living in a world full of other people with other interests.

It's probably part of my naïveté that I don't want to put the issue in political terms when it's probably irreducibly political. Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.

The fact is that we're all lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it's almost a cliché.

Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.

Johnette Foltz had hold of the Roy fellow's coat now with both hands and was trying to pull the fellow off, Keds scrabbling for purchase on the smooth parquet, saying 'Yo Roy T. man, easy there Dude, Man, Esse, Bro, Posse, Crew, Homes, Jim, Brother, he's just new is all'; but by this time Erdedy had both arms around the guy's neck and was hugging him with such vigor Kate Gompert later told Joelle van Dyne it looked like Erdedy was trying to climb him.

Someone has farted; no one knows just who, but this isn't like a normal adult place where everybody coolly pretends a fart didn't happen; here everybody has to make their little comment.

We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.

My own plan for the coming fourteen months is to knock on doors and stuff envelopes. Maybe even to wear a button. To try to accrete with others into a demographically significant mass. To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more.

Metafictionists may have had aesthetic theories out the bazoo, but they were also sentient citizens of a community that was exchanging an old idea of itself as a nation of doers and be-ers for a new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers.

Rod and Tom and I had that three-planked platform-exhibit. One: waste. Two: no new enhancements. Three: find somebody outside the borders of our community selves to blame. T

a "game" that will give everyone the consoling impression of making contact, together, with the ultimate transcendent referent.

The thing that I think a lot of us forget is that part of the fault is the books . . . you get this sort of cycle that as they become less important commercially they begin protecting their egos by talking more and more to each other and establishing themselves as this kind of tight cloistered world that doesn't really have anything to do with regular readers.

351. As in a combination of the First and Twelfth Steps, goes the AA joke: 'My Life is Unmanageable and I'd Like to Share it With You.

They talked about each others' houses, and characters, and families--just as the Joneses do about the Smiths.

Il rimedio è nelle mani degli artigiani, che su queste materie non sono ignoranti come la gente comune, e che non tendono a essere avari e a starsene isolati come i proletari delle manifatture o i mediatori; è a loro che competono l'onore e l'onere di educare il pubblico, ed essi recano in sé i semi dell'ordine e dell'organizzazione che renderanno più facile il loro compito.

Simplement parce les grandes oeuvres d'art, celles qui envahissent toute la vie, doivent résulter de la coopération harmonieuse entre voisins. Or, un homme riche n'a pas de voisins, mais des rivaux et des parasites.

pueblo no tenía poder en Colombia.

las democracias verdaderas se esfuerzan por integrar a las mayorías a unos modelos de educación, de salud, de higiene, de construcción de rituales compartidos

Life is a sort of spreadsheet program in which each cell's action is dictated by its neighbors.