Quotes about Community

One must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.

Kindness is not a word much at home in current political and religious speech, but it is a rich word and a necessary one. There is good reason to think that we cannot live without it. Kind is obviously related to kin, but also to race and to nature. In the Middle Ages kind and nature were synonyms. Equal, in the famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence, could be well translated by these terms: All men are created kin, or of a kind, or of the same race or nature.

He would get up in the midst of the crowded shop, interrupting the conversation, and start outside to relieve himself. "All who can't swim, mount the highest bench," he would cry out, "for the great he-elephant will now make water!

Because I have never separated myself from my home neighborhood, I cannot identify myself to myself apart from it. I am fairly literally flesh of its flesh. It is present in me, and to me, wherever I go. This

And then Andy told him about Meikelberger's farm. Had Isaac ever thought of buying more land — say, a neighbor's farm? Well, if I did I've have to go in debt to buy it, and to farm it. It would be more time and help than I've got. And I'd lose my neighbor. You'd rather have your neighbor? We're supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves. We try. If you need them, it helps.

People are making careful, comely, dignified work of the essential tasks defined by modern values as "drudgery." And because they have thought of the well-being of all the people, all are busy. There is a use for everyone. The Amish do not have the abandoned children, cast-off old people, criminals, indigents, and vagrants whom we have "freed from drudgery." And

It might prove out to be," Athey said, "that if we can't live together we can't live at all. Did you ever think about that?

Mr. Feltner—who would not be "Mat" to me for a long time—turned to me and stuck out his hand. "Mr. Crow, I'm Mat Feltner. I'm glad to know you. I knew your mother's people. I remember the Daggets very well." There was nothing glancing or sidling about the way he looked at you. He looked right through your eyes, right into you, as a man looks at you who is willing for you to look right into him.

But if nobody can ever quite be nothing to you in Port William, then everybody finally has got to be something to you.

A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.

If we are serious about these big problems, we have got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves. Thus we put an end to our habit of oversimplification. If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we ourselves must be prepared to become poorer. If

One of the best days of the year, for me, was Decoration Day, when people would come from near and far with flowers to decorate the graves. Besides being beautiful and fragrant with all the roses and peonies and boughs of mock orange, it was a kind of grace and benediction, and a kind of homecoming. I liked to make a show of being busy in the graveyard so I could watch and listen.