Quotes about community

Difference unites us. While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.

When the cold wind blows the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.

The activity of rooting for baseball and other sports teams is one of the strongest expressions of community remaining in our society.

The men who learn endurance, are they who call the whole world brother.

"A pack works together, Bran," he cried. "Don't ever forget that. If we don't have that, what by Tor and Fenris do we have?"

“Damn you!" Dagenham raged, “Don’t you realize that you can’t trust people? They don’t know enough for their own good.”

“Then let them learn or die. We’re all in this together. Let’s live or die together.”

What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.

You can’t respect other people’s individuality if you focus on your own individuality in a kind of abstract, isolated way. The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That’s concrete individuality: an individuality that recognizes that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.

To take the choice of another … to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to … for all we individuals to have … our choices.

The white man is very clever. He came quietly with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

If one finger brings oil it soils the others.

Naturals felt best in groups of a hundred or so, and better if only a few dozen were involved. Hunting parties had been about that size, for the long-extinct big game. Many important institutions were of the same rough scale: the ancient village, governing councils of nations, commanding elites of vast armies, teams playing games, orchestras, family fests. All human enterprises that worked were of that size, and nearly everything that failed was not.