Quotes About Community

a few must die so the rest can live in peace, well, such is the ugly but unavoidable cost of living in a civilized society. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

You see more people walking now. With children, dogs. We always wave from our front porch and think if they just keep on walking that direction, pretty soon they'll find themselves out on the prairie. Think of that. An aerial view of all these kind, goodhearted, small-town people, kids in tow and dogs on leashes, walking across the prairie in a kind of trance, a kind of resignation.

I think family is very important in West Virginia and has long been so because the mountains made travel difficult in the past, and family members had to depend on each other.

Why does it help to read others' stories? It is not only that misery loves company, because (I learned) misery is too self-absorbed to want much company. Others' experiences did help with my emotional struggle...

This is the way that misery does love company: People are relieved to learn that they are not alone in their suffering, that they are part of something larger, in this case, a societal plague [drugs]--an epidemic of children, an epidemic of families.

Drugs pervade every college campus in America, and every city, so a young adult must learn to live among them.

In a letter thanking Pamela for the chart, Jarvis wrote, "People on the yard saw what I was doing, and they looked up, too. They passed the chart around and asked questions. I looked around and saw men from one side of the yard to the other all looking up to the sky. One of the rarest spectacles I've ever seen. Then I look over at the guards in the gun towers—they were looking up, too. Everyone just looking into the sky.

in the San Francisco Bay Area, where one out of every three people seem to be a therapist of some sort. What does this say about us? Scott Peck said that the sickest and healthiest people are in therapy. Which are we?

You're a good lot, you Deadheads. I'm proud to be one of you.

Religion does not own activism.

The more, and the louder, we come out today, the easier it will be for those who can't do so until tomorrow.

Murder often doesn't unsettle a man. In Baltimore, it usually doesn't even ruin his day.

If a drug dealer falls in West Baltimore and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound?

you believe a little shithead like this is able to stay on the run for so long?" McLarney declares, returning from yet another unsuccessful turn-up of a Milligan hideout. "You shoot a guy, hey," the sergeant adds with a shrug. "You shoot another guy—well, okay, this is Baltimore. You shoot three guys, it's time to admit you have a problem.

The three-story derelict is home to Smitty, Gale, and Gale's baby - a nuclear family nested on the corner - and Ella is accustomed to seeing them on the front steps, waiting for redemption or a cool breeze from the harbor, neither of which seems particularly likely.

West Baltimore. You sit on your stoop, you drink Colt 45 from a brown paper bag and you watch the radio car roll slowly around the corner. You see the gunman, you hear the shots, you gather on the far corner to watch the paramedics load what remains of a police officer into the rear of an ambulance. Then you go back to your rowhouse, open another can, and settle in front of the television to watch the replay on the eleven o'clock news. Then you go back to the stoop.

If you want to be happy, cultivate a passion, be part of something bigger than yourself (have a Cause other than that of yourself), avoid self-absorption and self-obsession, know thyself via knowing others and connecting with others. Above all, connect to more than yourself and your immediate nearest and dearest.

Not that Marcus had any problems with Mexicans, seeing as they had a common enemy in the Orange One

Where two or more are gathered in the name of that which loves, that which is compassionate, that which liberates, there blessing is also.

The best people in life make the world a bigger place, then help you grow to fit it.

Meaning springs from belonging.

The way we live has less to do with individual choices and more to do with the general bent of our society than many of us realize. We forget that we don't need everything.

Societies accomplished important goals that still elude politicians, specialists in public policy, social reformers, and philanthropists. They successfully created vast social and mutual aid networks among the poor that are now almost entirely absent in many atomistic inner cities.

And this is as good a picture as any of how counterculture communities like the Haight took care of the war's mangled souls: a doctor from a hippie clinic carrying a dying, emaciated soldier in his arms. For decades after the war, up to this very day, right-wing politicians and pundits have spread the libel about how peace activists and hippies greeted returning Vietnam vets with gobs of spit and contempt.