Quotes About Community

Even the Catholics deserted Mary in her hour of need.

Les autres [leaders de l'époque] suppliaient qu'on nous laisse entrer dans la maison de l'oppresseur, Malcolm [Malcolm X], lui, nous disait de construire notre propre maison

He can no longer have God for a Father, who has not the Church for a Mother.

When you live in New York or any big city, it is easy to fail at growing up. The city is designed to keep you in a state of perpetual adolescence.

Philadelphia is called "The City of Brotherly Love," which is a lie. Philadelphia is not a nice city.

Doing is inherently plural, collective, choral, communal.

If each human being is to have liberty, he cannot also have the liberty to deprive others of their liberty.

Our experience with the Nazis had shown one thing: where racism is practiced, it damages the whole community, not just the victim group. Were we racists or were we not? That was the important thing to discover.

I traveled from city to city in those days, and the view from within the ghettos was terrible and terrifying. While white people in the periphery were arming themselves against the day when they would have to defend themselves from attack by blacks (and really believed someone was fomenting a racial war in which black people would rise up and attack them), black people mostly without arms huddled inside the ghettos feeling that they were surrounded by armed whites.

Local white leadership was discredited in the eyes of black people, too, by their insistence on asking me, when we met to discuss the local events, usually with black people, if I had discovered who was the traveling black agitator who had come in and stirred up their "good black people." And had I discovered if there were any communists behind the disruptions?

Certainly many Northern cities deplored what was going on in the South. But when Martin Luther King, who had been so praised in the North for the work he did in the South, came to work in the cities of the North, the very officials who had praised him sometimes led opposition to his work locally.

I told them good night and returned to my room, less lonely and warmed by the brief contact with others like me who felt the need to be reassured that an eye could show something besides suspicion or hate

I remained in my room more and more each day. The situation in Montgomery was so strange I decided to try passing back into white society.

No touching Baby Jesus." "But we're his parents!" proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. "Mary Beth," Barb Wiggin said, "if you touch the Baby Jesus, I'm putting you in a cow costume.

but I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar -- you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace. My cousins were both small-towners and outsiders; they had not grown up with Own Meany, who was so strange to them that he inspired awe - yet they were no more likely to fall upon him, or to devise ways to torture him, than it was likely for a herd of cattle to attack a cat.

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

We don't enjoy giving directions in New Hampshire-we tend to think if you don't know where you're going, you don't belong where you are.

there was no better company for an especially personal revelation than the company of virtual strangers.

Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can't turn you away.

Flor and Juan Diego and Lupe were the Iowan's projects; Edward Bonshaw saw them through the eyes of a born reformer, but he did not love them less for looking upon them in this fashion.

What Brother Pepe saw in Edward Bonshaw was a man who looked like he belonged—like a man who had never felt at home, but who'd suddenly found his place in the scheme of things.

The code of small towns is simple but encompassing: if many forms of craziness are allowed, many forms of cruelty are ignored. Piggy

but I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar—you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.

It won't take much of a city to be a city for me