Community Quotes - Page 11

Such is a communityof inviolable immunity, protectedfrom tampering or harpooningmutiny. Every better thinker’s impulse to shrink us (at the shoreline from our lifeblood’s deep pulse) uses disparaging scrutiny to sink us.

Ask the person who found you about what kind of people she was looking for before meeting you, as she may not know that she has found one of them already.

Law, rather than harnessing the passions, is increasingly pressed into their service.

There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals.

And if you don’t underestimate me, I won’t underestimate you.

Pakistan is an Islamic country and the victim of an Easter terrorist attack. Groups like Isis or in this case the Taliban are not about religion. No more than the KKK is about Christianity. These groups are about hate! I did post on the Pakistani attack because it is really important to point out that brown and black people in the middle east and Africa are being killed. Terrorism isn't about Islam. It is about hate. SO let's fight this hate. Let's stand united with our Islamic brothers and sisters who are being slaughtered. Step back from judging a religion you are not exposed to. Understand that we need to work together. ALL faiths. That's how we defeat this

Relationships formed through Jiu Jitsu are deeply rooted in respect for one another, and this is often not the case in matters of modern society.

Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.

The secular world often finds its constituents disenfranchised and solitary as it has spent a great deal of time debating the religious community while failing to build a true community of its own.

We are only human when we are part of a community. ... I tried to isolate you, but it could not be done. I surrounded you with hostility; you took most of your enemies and rivals and made friends of them. ... You were a part of them; they carried you inside them all their lives.

Though at opposite ends of our country, Maine and Hawaii are, other than climate, much alike. Places where you say who you are, be who you are, keep your word, and don't cheat or lie to take advantage of each other. Where you protect other folks because they are your tribe.

No amount of community policing will cause the common people to accept a known corrupt police department.

When the highest value in a community is loyalty to the greater cause, meaning the continuity of the status quo, all means to this end are imbued with religious significance, and are thereby justified.

Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God.

As a way of life, an act of love, an expression of faith, our hospitality reflects and anticipates God's welcome. Simultaneously costly and wonderfully rewarding, hospitality often involves small deaths and little resurrections. By God's grace we can grow more willing, more eager, to open the door to a needy neighbor, a weary sister or brother, a stranger in distress. Perhaps as we open that door more regularly, we will grow increasingly sensitive to the quiet knock of angels. In the midst of a life-giving practice, we too might catch glimpses of Jesus who asks for our welcome and welcomes us home.

My vision of the gathered church that had come to me... had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on... It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another's love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.

In solitude we can come to the realization that we are not driven together but brought together. In solitude we come to know our fellow human beings not as partners who can satisfy our deepest needs, but as brothers and sisters with whom we are called to give visibility to God's all-embracing love. In solitude we discover that community is not a common ideology, but a response to a common call. In solitude we indeed realize that community is not made but given.

It’s hopeless, trying to recruit a stranger to help me find someone who’s a stranger to him. But then again, we are all strangers to ourselves, caught up in the monotony of daily life, stuck in our routines, never really stopping to think about what will happen to us if we fall off track.

All believers need to become teachers, shepherds, ministers, and good-news-bearers.

You could call her perilous because she was so strong in herself.

Whenever we take the focus off ourselves and move it outward, we benefit. Life's most fortunate ironies are that what's best for the long run is best now, and selflessness serves our interests far better than selfishness. The wider our circle of considerations, the more stable we make the world—and the better the prospects for human experience and for all we might wish. The core message of each successive widening: we are one. The geometry of the human voyage is not linear; it's those ripples whose circles expand to encompass self, other, community, Life, and time.

Here’s to the “so-so-ing” it.Here’s to the working since I was 14 in a smoke clouded day. Here’s to saying I could stay until the forms were faxed.Here’s to driving home past dark and dozing off the road.Here’s to no over time.Here’s to the long line to management.Here’s to ALREADY DONE THAT!Here’s to quitting, saying I’m through, saying I can’t compete for your leftover lean cuisine. Here’s to art. Here’s to freedom. Here’s to saying God gave me every penny and knowing it’s true. Here’s to the next 40 years with you.Here’s to the new.— Adrianna Stepiano

We are each born into a situation—a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation—and born into the stories told of each of these.

you don’t have to live in community long to realize that lives which are blessed and instructive are still flawed. The grace of the gospel isn’t only that the Word was made flesh in Jesus, but also that the eternal Word is made present in weak and wonderful people.

This is why I prefer Queens to any other place. The borough of my parents and small business owners is populated by people who know how to work around the system when it tries to fuck you.

Love, marriage, divorce, infidelity... life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn't? She realized now wrong she'd been; the pali wasn't a headstone and Kalaupapa wasn't a grave. It was a community like any other, bound by ties deeper than most, and people here went to their deaths as people did anywhere: with great reluctance, dragging the messy jumble of their lives behind them.

Howard was almost as fond of this hall as he was of his own shop. The Brownies used it on Tuesdays, and the Women's Institute on Wednesdays. It had hosted jumble sales and Jubilee celebrations, wedding receptions and wakes, and it smelled of all of these things: of stale clothes and coffee urns, and the ghosts of home-baked cakes and meat salads; of dust and human bodies; but primarily of aged wood and stone.

Well, in the early days of humans, the community was our only protection against predators, and against the starvation. We survived because we trusted one another.

Until a man love God, can he love his neighbour.

Whatever dream God gave to you is for the comfort of those God keeps around you!

The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.

Every cult of personality that emphasizes the distinguished qualities, virtues, and talents of another person, even though these be of an altogether spiritual nature, is worldly and has no place in the Christian community; indeed, it poisons the Christianity community.

And then they started deleting the protest reviews.That was my line. When they started to stamp out dissent, actually to make it disappear with virtually no excuse for doing so...that’s not neglect. That’s not an overwhelmed person or people trying to figure it out. That’s an entity that has decided that they do not care, that they have moved on from the issue, do not see it as an issue, and is trying to avoid bad press. Or they are too far down the line to backtrack on what they’ve been doing and save face. They’re content with their wildly inconsistent policy enough to no longer care what effect it is having on their user base. If you try to silence dissent, then something is very, very wrong.

For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. 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. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as His own people and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness, and truth then formerly we have been acquainted with.

The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows cheaply from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades. Charles Darwin

A civilization must be judged by its standards not by its expenditure.

Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.

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.

Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in.

Storytelling comes naturally to humans, but since we live in an unnatural world, we sometimes need a little help doing what we'd naturally do.

Infusing the cultural war with love, respect and empathy is the responsibility of every one who cares about the health and wellbeing of women, our families and communities, and our democracy.

We are halves, but we make an infinite whole.

The Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament.

Our communities basically want the same things—safe, clean environments; affordable, adequate housing and transportation; educational opportunities; accessible, quality health care; meaningful work at a fair wage; and equitable services for everyone. So, in the spirit of warmth and energy that our campfire metaphor brings, I invite each of you to be the spark that ignites your community to be safer, healthier, and fairer—and fired up for change.

We are not a voice for the voiceless. The truth is that there is a lot of noise out there drowning out quiet voices, and many people have stopped listening to the cries of their neighbors. Lots of folks have put their hands over their ears to drown out the suffering. Institutions have distanced themselves from the disturbing cries..It is a beautiful thing when folks in poverty are no longer just a missions project but become genuine friends and family with whom we laugh, cry, dream, and struggle. One of the verses I have grown to love is the one where Jesus is preparing to leave the disciples and says, "I no longer call you servants.... Instead, I have called you friends" (John 15:15). Servanthood is a fine place to begin, but gradually we move toward mutual love, genuine relationships. Someday, perhaps we can even say those words that Ruth said to Naomi after years of partnership: "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried" (Ruth 1:16-17).

As I stand there, staring absently at the stirring pot on the wall, I remember Greg’s words all those years ago: No one could create peace for me. Yes, I did the tough work to heal on my own. But in the process I’d missed the finer point. An insular life is just another wall. The realization rushes over me: There can be no peace without community. Real community – people to count on, and who could count on me.

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?

We've come a long way from the time when the crowning achievement in a woman's life was her youthful marriage. And many would agree that this represents progress for women. But when did the search for someone to marry become self-absorbed and pathetic? This absence of social sympathy for women's ambitions to marry is all the more striking because the social world has cared so deeply about virtually every other aspect of these privileged young women's inner and outer lives. (...) The achievement of a good marriage is the one area of life where the most privileged, accomplished, and high achieving young women in society face a loss of support and sympathy for their ambitions and where the social expectations are for disappointment and failure, not success.

Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul like you.

Allow the way to your great work to be guided by your service to others.

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world. summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.I believe that health is wholeness. For many years I have returned again and again to the work of the English agriculturist SirAlbert Hovvard, who said, in The Soil and Health, that "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man [is] one great subject."I am moreover a Luddite, in what I take to be the true and appropriate sense. I am not "against technology" so much as I am for community. When the choice is between the health of a community and technological innovation, I choose the health of the community I would unhesitatingly destroy a machine before I would allow the machine to destroy my community.I believe that the community-in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures-is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.

...but most of all he liked to listen to stories of real life. He smiled gleefully as he listened to such stories, putting in words and asking questions, all aiming at bringing out clearly the moral beauty of the action of which he was told. Attachments, friendships, love, as Pierre understood them, Karataev had none, but he loved and lived on affectionate terms with every creature with whom he was thrown in life, and especially so with man- not with any particular man, but with the men that happened to be before his eyes.But his life, as he looked at it, had no meaning as a separate life. It only had meaning as part of a whole, of which he was at all times conscious.

So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community. And in the fibres of that blanket there were threads of obligation that meant that one could not ignore the claims of others. Nobody should starve; nobody should feel that they were outsiders; nobody should be alone in their sadness.

Think of the power we could have if all the energy and effort in the world – or maybe even just your energy and effort? – that goes into drinking were put into resisting, building, creating. Try adding up all the money anarchists in your community have spent on corporate libations, and picture how much musical equipment or bail money or food it could have paid for – instead of funding their war against all of us.

Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort.

In my opinion, the state of mind of a community is always directly due to the influence of the man at the top.

Those who have not lived in New Orleans have missed an incredible, glorious, vital city--a place with an energy unlike anywhere else in the world, a majority-African American city where resistance to white supremacy has cultivated and supported a generous, subversive, and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues, and and hip-hop to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funerals, and the citywide tradition of red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and food and traditions and sexuality and liberation.

Everyone knows the experience of encountering other persons only under the aspect of how they intersect with our projects, and of noticing them only insofar as we have to notice them in order to interact with them as we pursue our goals. But from time to time we realize more keenly that the other with whom we are dealing is a person, and then we feel the irreverence and the arrogance of our attitude. We become aware of a certain violence with which we have been treating other persons; we realize that we have to draw back and grant them a space in which to be themselves as persons, and that we have to cease seeing them exclusively in relation to our projects.

For more than three decades, coffee has captured my imagination because it is a beverage about individuals as well as community. A Rwandan farmer. Eighty roast masters at six Starbucks plants on two continents. Thousands of baristas in 54 countries. Like a symphony, coffee's power rests in the hands of a few individuals who orchestrate its appeal. So much can go wrong during the journey from soil to cup that when everything goes right, it is nothing short of brilliant! After all, coffee doesn't lie. It can't. Every sip is proof of the artistry -- technical as well as human -- that went into its creation.