Quotes About Community

Our where determines our who," Reg Saner once wrote.

I can help a lot of other people who've gone through the same thing by building a center that will help men and women who don't have the funds to take care of themselves and get the medical treatment.

families from remote stations

I have found a flat on Merseyside and am settling down here. If I can keep playing and get back to full match fitness, I know I have a lot to offer still.

In this sense, the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one's trust in other human beings.

Everyday we wake up and collectively make a world together; but which one of us, left to our own devices, would ever decide they wanted to make a world like this one?

Residents of the squatter community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, have a Christmastide ritual where they dress in Santa suits, take toys from department stores and distribute them to children on the street, partly just so everyone can relish the images of the cops beating down Santa and snatching the toys back from crying children.

The real origin of the democratic spirit - and most likely, many democratic institutions - lies precisely in those spaces of improvisation just outside the control of governments and organized churches.

We are projects of collective self-creation.

There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

if we have the means to build them, why shouldn't they? Are there families who don't "deserve" houses?)

Americans pride themselves on being a democratic society, but if you ask the average American "When was the last time you were part of a group of more than five people who made a collective decision on a more or less equal basis?" most will just scratch their heads.

the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one's trust in other human beings.

Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a certain communism of the senses at the root of most things we consider fun.

They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.'24

Always owe somebody something, then he will be forever praying God to grant you a good, long and blessed life. Fearing to lose what you owe him, he will always be saying good things about you in every sort of company; he will be constantly acquiring new lenders for you, so that you can borrow to pay him back, filling his ditch with other men's spoil.

I have dwelt on the Lele in such detail in part because I wanted to convey some sense of why I was using the term "human economy," what life is like inside one, what sort of dramas fill people's days, and how money typically operates in the midst of all this.

The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?

Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.

Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.

Violence and care, in the Wendat case, were to be entirely separated.

we do owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in, our habits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions—all of this we learned from other people, most of them long dead.

It's not that we owe "society." If there is any notion of "society" here—and it's not clear that there is—society is our debts.