Quotes About Interdependence

Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle.

Our ancient experience confirms at every point that everything is linked together, everything is inseparable.

Environmental protection doesn't happen in a vacuum. You can't separate the impact on the environment from the impact on our families and communities.

We win or lose together as a team. Either we help everyone on the ship arrive safely in port or we will all be lost at sea.

We cannot build a vital economy by delivering pizzas to one another.

Like the utensils that are too long to get food and return it to our own mouths—we got married because we couldn't meet our own needs. We needed a partner to serve us and to fulfill us.

You can't be with someone else effectively, unless you can stand to be alone with yourself," he declared. "Being part of a couple isn't the final answer. It can't define who you are.

Often there's no help in the home, but there are neighbors and friends and the people at nurseries and day-care centers. All of them help a child to learn to get along with all sorts of people and become more independent. Seeing people encourages him to make decisions for himself. When he sees his parents at his own special time of the day he enjoys them more than if they were underfoot all the time.

Thomas Berry, in The Dream of the Earth,

Competing to be the best leads inevitably to a destructive, zero-sum competition that no one can win. As offerings converge, gain for one becomes loss for the other. This is the very essence of "zero sum.

but I remembered what a therapist once told me, "People like doing favors for each other. Don't deny someone else the pleasure, Kiki, just because you can't handle feeling obligated.

Grace happens when we act with others on behalf of our world.

It is the delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its boundaries; that it is so small and so needy that we must endlessly acquire and endlessly consume; and that as individuals, corporations, nation-states, or a species, we can be immune to what we do to other beings. The

The obvious choice, then, is to extend our notions of self-interest. For example, it would not occur to me to plead with you, "Don't saw off your leg. That would be an act of violence." It wouldn't occur to me (or to you) because your leg is part of your body. Well, so are the trees in the Amazon rain basin. They are our external lungs. We are beginning to realize that the world is our body. The

On the one hand, it was nice to have someone who was concerned about you. But on the other hand, you couldn't ever feel truly independent. Marriage was a trade-off. You gave up some things and you gained others.

I woke up one morning thinking about wolves and realized that wolf packs function as families. Everyone has a role, and if you act within the parameters of your role, the whole pack succeeds, and when that falls apart, so does the pack.

We contain the other, hopelessly and forever.

We contain the other, hopelessly and forever." —James Baldwin

He never would have reached this point, the middle, without her.

We're all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is.

We're not separated from the world by our own edges." Charlie set down his beer glass, empty now, and rubbed his hand up and down his arm, as an example of one of his edges. "We're part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother's garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We're all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is.

This book argues that staying alive—for every species—requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die.

The most important distinction anyone can ever make in their life is between who they are as an individual and their connection with others.

Look for what's there, but most of all, look for the relationships between things. Find the systems