Quotes About Community

The village is coming back, like it or not.

What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.

Researchers have done a lot of work over the past few years analyzing social networks. It turns out almost everything is contagious. If your friends are obese, you are more likely to be obese. If your friends are happy, you're more likely to be happy. If your friends smoke, you smoke. If they feel lonely, you feel lonely.

The meritocracy defines "community" as a mass of talented individuals competing with one another.

I think the rampant individualism of our current culture is a catastrophe. The emphasis on self—individual success, self-fulfillment, individual freedom, self-actualization—is a catastrophe.

The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.

Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction.

They finally achieve a sort of outward-facing union.

What we give to our community in pennies, our communities give back to us in dollars.

People often use partisan identity to fill the void left when their other attachments wither away - ethnic, neighborhood, religious, communal and familial. This is asking more from politics than politics can deliver. Once politics becomes your ethnic or moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor.

Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when they work within the rooted spot, the concrete habit, the particular reality of their town and family.

The houses were small, there was no air-conditioning, and TV had not yet penetrated, so when the weather was warm, social life was conducted on the front stoops, in the alleys, and with children running from house to house all day. A young homeowner was enveloped in a series of communal activities that, as Ehrenhalt puts it, "only the most determined loner could escape: barbecues, coffee klatches, volleyball games, baby-sitting co-ops and the constant bartering of household goods.

without social trust, the political system devolves into a brutal shoving match

Apparently, we have become such a hyper-individualized culture that it is impossible to develop an argument based on how individual cases fit into the fabric of the common good.

By this time a lot of men and women of doubtful reputation were hanging around Jesus, listening intently. The Pharisees and religion scholars were not pleased, not at all pleased. They growled, 'He takes in sinners and eats meals with them, treating them like old friends.'"6 I love that translation. He wasn't just tolerating the people of doubtful reputation; He was treating them like old friends!

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

I've rarely kept my distance from kind of - I don't know if we can call it politics, but kind of, civic engagement and that kind of thing, except I tended to think, 'Well, do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.'

Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community.

I ride on the shoulder of a road that is lined with chain stores, none of them specific to this area. Everyone who works in them is therefore an employee hired by some anonymous distant corporation. They probably are only allowed to make small decisions and they have almost no stake or investment in the place where they work.

Music as social glue, as a self-empowering change agent, is maybe more profound than how perfectly a specific song is composed or how immaculately tight a band is.

In the words of Enrique Peñalosa, who instituted bike and pedestrian streets and rapid transit in Bogotá when he was mayor, if a bike lane isn't safe for an eight-year-old child, it isn't really a bike lane.

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one's own town.

All that interconnectedness that facilitated much of the explosion of megawealth over the last decade also facilitated the interpenetration of everything, so no one or no building is truly isolated and 'safe' anymore. Safety is in getting along. (p.261)

God never intended for an individual to solve all of life's problems. He intended for each one of us to use whatever resources and gifts He gave us to make a difference where we are.13