Quotes About Community

The most important input into conservative thinking is the desire to sustain the networks of familiarity and trust on which a community depends for its longevity. Conservatism is what its name says it is: the attempt to conserve the community that we have

Hence we inevitably see ourselves from outside, as others see us, and seek for their approval and sympathy, which is the greatest of social goods.

I shared his love of the countryside and of the old ways of building; I believed, as he did, that the modernist styles of architecture that were desecrating our town were also destroying its social fabric; and I saw, for the first time in my life, that it is always right to conserve things, when worse things are proposed in their place. That a priori law of practical reason is also the truth in conservatism.

Children of married parents find a place in society already prepared for them, furnished by a regime of parental sacrifice, and protected by social norms. Take away marriage and you expose children to the risk of coming into the world as strangers.

Anyone can lie. It suffices to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, however, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed: but his pretence is part of the lie. The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member.

Beneath every society where self-interest pays off, lies a foundation of self-sacrifice.

A nation-state is a form of customary order, the byproduct of human neighborliness, shaped by an "invisible hand" from the countless agreements between people who speak the same language and live side by side. It results from compromises established after many conflicts, and expresses the slowly forming agreement among neighbors both to grant each other space and to protect that space as common territory.

It is part of our rational nature to strive for a community of judgement, a shared conception of value, since that is what reason and the moral life require.

Implicit in our sense of beauty is the thought of community—of the agreement in judgements that makes social life possible and worthwhile.

Durkheim pointed out that you don't merely believe a religion but (more importantly) you belong to it, and that disputes over religious doctrine are, as a rule, not simply arguments about abstruse questions of metaphysics but attempts to give a viable test of membership, and hence a way of identifying and excluding the heretics who threaten the community from within. Religion

One of the great gifts of the Enlightenment is that we can form communities without necessaily agreeing on ultimate metaphysical grounds. We know that to a great extent that the principles of social coordination are manmade, we recognise the right of the other to exist. This is something that distinguishes our part of the world from the middle East.

In short, freedom belongs to individuals only by virtue of their membership in the 'we'.

We have to take our neighbours seriously, as people with an equal claim to protection, for whom we might be required, in moments of crisis, to face mortal danger. We do this because we believe ourselves to belong together in a shared home. The

First, a man may in some ways be superior to his fellows and still serve them, if together they serve a common cause which is greater than any one man. I believe that I serve such a cause, or I would not be doing it.

Only friends steal books.

The nearby Hopis danced and prayed for rain. His people did not. They sought to live with their environment rather than to control it.

The whole quilt is much more important than any single square.

There's only one way to defeat the sorrow and sadness of life - with laughter and rejoicing. Bring out the good dishes, put on your good clothes, no sense hoarding them.

The lives of the poor are rich in symbols.

And, in any case, the idea of independence was a fantasy. Everyone depended on someone.

He wanted his noises to touch the others; friendly noises could melt hostility.

All things fall and are built again, and those that build them again are gay

Everyone is "extremely nice"—and yet I feel entirely alone. ("Abandonitis").

Isolation and competition are inhospitable to learning.