quotations about community
Community is not an ideal; it is people. It is you and I. In community we are called to love people just as they are with their wounds and their gifts, not as we want them to be.
JEAN VANIER
From Brokenness to Community
Don't be a hog: the only time a hog helps the community is when he dies.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members. What is this "something more?" Even to begin to answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short.
M. SCOTT PECK
The Different Drum
We need to bridge our sense of loneliness and disconnection with a sense of community and continuity even if we must manufacture it from our time on the Web and our use of calling cards to connect long distance. We must "log on" somewhere, and if it is only in cyberspace, that is still far better than nowhere at all.
JULIA CAMERON
God Is No Laughing Matter
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
KURT VONNEGUT
Palm Sunday
But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.
BELL HOOKS
All About Love: New Visions
Anyone who says that society can be run on the basis of everyone's trying to maximize his own greed is talking total nonsense. And to teach it in schools, and to go on television and call it the American way of life still doesn't make it true. Competition and envy cannot become the basis of any society or any community.
CARROLL QUIGLEY
"The State of Individuals"
Community is composed of that which we don't attempt to measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense. Most are things we cannot measure no matter how hard we try.
DEE HOCK
One from Many
Community is a word that alters in different contexts in an almost chameleon-like fashion.
SHARON MACDONALD
A Companion to Museum Studies
Many people are good at talking about what they are doing, but in fact do little. Others do a lot but don't talk about it; they are the ones who make a community live.
JEAN VANIER
Community and Growth
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
DOROTHY DAY
The Long Loneliness
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
JOHN DONNE
No Man Is an Island
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual; the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
The original community is believed to have had no idea, or only a rudimentary idea, of private property; and as men emerged from the condition of animals, they possibly held all things in common within their communal association. Theoretically, men and women, like all else, in the earliest stage of society were communal property. No tie connected individual men and women together. No man had the right to appropriate any one woman to himself, nor had any woman the right to appropriate to herself any one man. Such communities were large families and small States, with a strongly democratic organization and an elected chief or chiefs. All their members were equal, for all were brothers and sisters.
HENRY ADAMS
Historical Essays
Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.
ALVIN TOFFLER
The Third Wave
A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
HENRIK IBSEN
An Enemy of the People
We need to rebuild a sense of community
We can only begin with YOU AND ME
Picking up all the pieces we've spent
Our past years CHIPPING AWAY
VERSE
"Rebuild"
One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals. When we pool our strength and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress, and perhaps help them find self-confidence and inner healing.
JEAN VANIER
Community and Growth
Community is a place where the connections felt in our hearts make themselves known in the bonds between people, and where the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep opening our hearts.
PARKER J. PALMER
The Promise of Paradox
Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.
ORSON SCOTT CARD
Speaker for the Dead