quotations about community
The real existing community is a besieged fortress defending itself against the outside world.
GERARD DELANTY
Community
We have been born to associate with our fellow men, and to join in community with the human race.
CICERO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Unanimous hatred is the greatest medicine for a human community.
AESCHYLUS
Eumenides
Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.
WENDELL BERRY
"The Body and the Earth,", The Art of the Commonplace
A community is alive when it is poor and its members feel they have to work together and remain united, if only to ensure that they can all eat tomorrow!
JEAN VANIER
Community and Growth
We live in a community of people not so that we can suppress and dominate each other or make each other miserable but so that we can better and more reliably satisfy all life's healthy needs.
WILHELM REICH
Children of the Future
A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives.
WENDELL BERRY
The Long-Legged House
Trying to study community is like trying to scoop Jell-O with your fingers. You can get hold of some, but there's always more slipping away from you.... Not only is the subject matter broad but it is also divided into differing camps, whose debates with one another continue heatedly and underlie much of the research being done. But the Jell-O analogy holds in this sense too, because in the process of debate the controversial issues have become mixed together in a gelatinous mass of hypotheses, research, and value judgments.
MARCIA EFFRAT
attributed, Civic Communion: The Rhetoric of Community Building
All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like.... I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don’t challenge ourselves to actually practice.
BELL HOOKS
Teaching Community
They call this a community
I like to think of it as home
PET SHOP BOYS
"Single", Bilingual
We live in a community of people not so that we can suppress and dominate eachother or make each other miserable but so that we can better and more reliably satisfy all life's healthy needs.
WILHELM REICH
Children of the Future
The more people that meet each other, the better it is for all of them.
FLETCHER PRATT
Tales From Gavagan's Bar
Every nation is destined, by the law of God and humanity, to form a free and equal community of brothers.
GIUSEPPE MAZZINI
Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini
Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines.
DEAN KOONTZ
Relentless
We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.
JOHN WINTHROP
Life and Letters of John Winthrop
Community is an expression of fragmentation of society and is forever in tension with it but at the same time cannot exist without it.
GERARD DELANTY
Modernity and Postmodernity
Being enveloped by a community is like being held in a sort of ... comfortable strait jacket, if you can imagine such a thing. You can't move much. You can't move at all unless the Community permits it. You can't see anything. There's no smell. Somehow, though, after the first time, it isn't frightening. It's peaceful and pleasant. I don't know why it should be, but it is.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Bloodchild and Other Stories
The great community of mankind had been subdivided into ten thousand communities, each organized for the ruin of the other.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Essay on Christianity
Community is universal love.
H. MARSH
attributed, Day's Collacon
We are not our brother's keeper we are our brother and we are our sister. We must look past complexion and see community.
MAYA ANGELOU
Facebook post, Jan. 9, 2014