Quotes About Community

if the people who called themselves Christians behaved like Christians, there wouldn't be any people sleeping in the street.

over 19,000 haiku about Spam—"Spamku"—have to this date been posted online.

Like Others In the end, I was like others. A person. Sometimes embarrassed, sometimes afraid. When "Fire!" was shouted, some ran toward it, some away— I neck-deep among them.

The Buddha himself had strongly discouraged this inward tendency and had always encouraged his followers to go out into the world.

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow.

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

Design is people.

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.

Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.

You can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.

Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.

Two parents, to say nothing of one, cannot possibly satisfy all the needs of a family-household. A community is needed as well, for raising children, and also to keep adults reasonably sane and cheerful. A community is a complex organism with complicated resources that grow gradually and organically.

frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood.

His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns,really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge. - discussing Ebenezer Howards' Garden City

When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.

The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts... Most of it is ostensibly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all.

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.

Dig your well for yourself, and also for the people who will follow along after you.