Quotes About Community

spaces," places (like cafés, diners, barbershops, and bookstores) where people are welcome to congregate and linger regardless of what they've purchased. Entrepreneurs typically start these kinds of businesses because they want to generate income. But in the process, as close observers of the city such as Jane Jacobs and the Yale ethnographer Elijah Anderson have discovered, they help produce the material foundations for social life.

The story of El Centro's creation and flourishing reminds us that civic power may not require a plan—but it does require a purpose.

If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

Christmas is a necessity. There has to be at least one day of the year to remind us that we're here for something else besides ourselves.

Community On and Off the Internet. Working paper, Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto.

addressed by new institutional forms, such as the user innovation communities that will be studied later in this book. Chapter 4 concludes

As long as women are denied the priesthood, we will try to make our own rituals at our own kitchen altars and we will sew our own magical capes at our own sewing machines

If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

Jews are made by the existence of anti-semitism....

But at the bottom of all the gloom, there is a sense that we are responsible for each other -- if not for each other's happiness. There is empathy, admiration, respect for the other's intelligence and honesty.

There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.

Ethical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief.

Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group.

The full humanization of man requires the breakthrough from the possession-centered to the activity-centered orientation, from selfishness and egotism to solidarity and altruism.

The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.

An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.

Naces solo y mueres solo, y en el paréntesis la soledad es tan grande que necesitas compartir la vida para olvidarlo.

Der Mensch] würde dem Wahnsinn verfallen, wenn er sich nicht aus diesem Gefängnis befreien könnte - wenn er nicht in irgendeiner Form seine Hände nach anderen Menschen ausstrecken und sich mit der Welt außerhalb seiner selbst vereinigen könnte.

Man can attempt to become one with the world by submission to a person, to a group, to an institution, to God. In this way, he transcends the separateness of his individual existence by becoming part of somebody or something bigger than himself, and experiences his identity in connection with the power to which he has submitted.

An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and belonging. On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances present.

It's so easy to believe that others deserve their fate, and the fact was that if nobody bothered to help other people then the worst would always happen… She stares out of her window at the busy street, where the British go about their daily business, taking it for granted that they will never be arrested for not voting the right way, praying the right way, dressing the right way or for belonging to a different tribe.

hold one another close …" I eased through the throng of candlelit faces as the minister quoted scripture and talked about the