Quotes About Community

And so you should." He again assessed the newly replaced windows and repaired roof, then clapped Mack on the shoulder. "It's a good thing you're doing. And if you take time to share your knowledge with the boys, it'll give them much more than a skill. It'll give them hope.

Grainier still went to services some rare times, when a trip to town coincided. People spoke nicely to him there, people recognized him from the days when he'd attended almost regularly with Gladys, but he generally regretted going. He very often wept in church. Living up the Moyea with plenty of small chores to distract him, he forgot he was a sad man. When the hymns began, he remembered.

But I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me. All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I have never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.

Your identity doesn't come from your address.

Sometimes family isn't the situation you're born into but the people who've chosen to love you along the way.

Civilization seems to be something we choose when it fits our purpose.

People were lost and people were scared and their lynch ropes couldn't reach bankers or stockbrokers, so they looked for targets closer to home.

Luther had passed many a white church in his day, heard them singing their hymns and chanting their Amens and seen them gather on a porch or two afterward with their lemonade and piety, but he knew if he ever showed up on their steps, starving or injured, the only response he'd get to a plea for human kindness would be the amen of a shotgun pointed in his face.

in Southie, most kids came out of the womb clutching a Schlitz and a pack of Luckies.

La cálida mano de Angie se cerraba en torno a la mía mientras dábamos media vuelta y, esquivando los escombros, seguíamos el camino de la brisa en dirección a nuestra parte de la ciudad.

Brian joking that if there was one place in the city where the locals didn't need help learning how to shoot—or dodge—bullets, it was Dorchester.

Not all the suburbs are white." "Name one that isn't. Just one." She tries. "Um . . ." He waits. "I can feel your look," she says. "It's very smug." "Our suburbs," he says, "are designed to escape the melting pot. But now they're telling all the people they left behind precisely how they should go about rubbing elbows.

If you want to have everybody agreeing with you, join a club or program or church that agrees with you.

the Sabbath almost singlehandedly creates and strengthens family ties and friendships. When a person takes off from work one day every week, that day almost inevitably becomes a day spent with other people—namely, family and/or friends. It has similar positive effects on marriages. Ask anyone married to a workaholic how good it would be for their marriage if the workaholic would not work for one day each week—and you can appreciate the power of the Sabbath Day.

Religious Americans donate more and volunteer more time to charitable institutions than do secular Americans.

The only happy people I know are people I don't know well.

The best way to combat racism is to have blacks and whites relate to one another as individuals, rather than as racial abstractions.... It becomes much harder to make a nasty generalization about another group after you have spent time in the home of one if its members.

If we are to save a society in deep trouble, many changes are necessary. In terms of rights, two changes are mandatory. First, far more Americans need to ask what is good for society? before asking what is good for my group? Second, we need people to speak up on behalf of the one truly helpless group—children. For this to happen, people must start to think of children as human beings, not as property.

If you build a society in which children honor their parents, your society will long survive. And the corollary is: A society in which children do not honor their parents is doomed to self-destruction.

But the human being is a social creature. We don't merely want companionship, we need it to survive.

In my view, both opinions are valid. But I side with the minority. It is extremely difficult to be decent when living among indecent people. Few people have the moral courage to reject their environment.

they have lived. For example, Jews have nearly always been better educated; Jewish family life has usually been more stable; Jews aided one another more than their non-Jewish neighbors aided each other; and Jewish men have been less likely to become drunk, beat their wives, or abandon their children. As a result of these factors, the quality of life of the average Jew, no matter how poor, was higher than that of a comparable non-Jew in the same society (see

I found out everybody's different – the same kind of different as me. We're all just regular folks walkin down the road God done set in front of us. The truth about it is, whether we is rich or poor or something in between, this earth ain't no final restin place. So in a way, we is all homeless – just workin our way toward home

I found out everybody's different--the same kind of different as me. We're all just regular folks walkin down the road God done set in front of us.