Community quotations

"A healthy social life is found only, when in the mirror of each soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the whole community the virtue of each one is living.” 
Rudolf Steiner 

“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, Jr. 

"A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.” 
Henrik Ibsen 

“Ubuntu is a concept that we have in our Bantu languages at home. Ubuntu is the essence of being a person. It means that we are people through other people. We can’t be fully human alone. We are made for interdependence, we are made for family. Indeed, my humanity is caught up in your humanity, and when your humanity is enhanced mine is enhanced as well. Likewise, when you are dehumanized, inexorably, I am dehumanized as well. As an individual, when you have Ubuntu, you embrace others. You are generous, compassionate. If the world had more Ubuntu, we would not have war. We would not have this huge gap between the rich and the poor. You are rich so that you can make up what is lacking for others. You are powerful so that you can help the weak, just as a mother or father helps their children.” 
Bishop Tutu 

"I passionately believe that the human spirit has a profound need for a sense of belonging and community. That quest for identity, something that is intrinsically of a human scale, is bound intimately to that which we build. The depressing spectacle of soulless housing estates, windswept industrial ‘parks’ and bland shopping malls both corrodes the human spirit and diminishes the natural environment." 
The Prince of Wales 

“It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual” 
Jeremy Bentham 

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” 
Aldo Leopold 

“A community needs a soul if it is to become a true home for human beings. You, the people must give it this soul.” 
Pope John Paul II 

"Apathy is alive and well and, alas, lives in London" 
Andrew Ampers Taylor 

"Tomorrow is cancelled owing to lack of interest" 
Seen on a public toilet wall in London. 

“Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers.” 
Howard Thurman 

"In my travels around the country it has become more and more apparent to me that when people feel excluded from their community and unable to make a contribution, the whole fabric of those communities is at serious risk. When that fabric starts to disintegrate then we all suffer – whatever our position. It seems to me the best way of starting to tackle the problems is to provide practical help which will encourage people to do something for themselves to regain their self-belief and once again feel part of the community." 
The Prince of Wales 

“There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.” 
John Ruskin