Community Quotes

Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould

~ Jonathan Haidt

God's glory is most majestically displayed not through you were through me, but through US. God raises up the Church, and says to all Creation in the heavens, on the Earth, and under the Earth, this is the bride and body of My Son, bought and purchased by His blood to be My people and receive My power, and enjoy My presence, and declare My praise forever and ever.

~ David Platt

God grows the Church through holiness in Christians.

~ David Platt

If we construct an economy where quantities are controlled, based on the belief there is never enough for all, then we must compete to determine the winners. We begin this with grades in the first grade. There is the presumption that competition is essential and so there must be a normal distribution of grades. All students cannot receive high marks. If I get an A, someone in the class must perform poorly. It is an early lesson in how the marketplace ideology works. In a community organized around abundance, competition will occur, but it is not built into the system as a core design element. In a neighborly culture, the abundance of resources becomes the design element

~ Walter Brueggemann

Each one of us is serious individually, but together we become frivolous.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

He was always the bridge, between men as well as between ideas.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.

~ Gloria Steinem

The continuous work of our life,” says Montaigne, “is to build death.” He quotes the Latin poets: Prima, quae vitam dedit, hora corpsit. And again: Nascentes morimur. Man knows and thinks this tragic ambivalence which the animal and the plant merely undergo. A new paradox is thereby introduced into his destiny. “Rational animal,” “thinking reed,” he escapes from his natural condition without, however, freeing himself from it. He is still a part of this world of which he is a consciousness. He asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. At every moment he can grasp the non-temporal truth of his existence. But between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing. This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Were people to mingle only with those of like mind, every man would be an insulate being. Thomas Jefferson

~ John Ferling

Isolation is not a healthy ‘coping’ method, it’s like quarantining yourself in a gas chamber!

~ Joshua Stannard

While never violating our uniqueness, we move together, united in heart and soul. Our greatness is unleashed in the context of community. When we move together, God is most perfectly revealed in us.

~ Erwin Raphael Mcmanus

Adams met with a convention on keeping the Sabbath and found the atmosphere surprisingly similar to that in Congress. Legalistic disputes so abounded that he found it difficult to keep order.

~ Paul C. Nagel

Our hatred of government is not caused mainly by government's goals, whatever their wisdom, but by government's techniques. Philip Howard

~ George F. Will

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

~ George F. Will

George Foreman looks as if he might have organically appeared out of the very ground around the church.

~ Davis Miller

Washington DC is happiest when in indignation overdrive.

~ George F. Will

Hence, when his name was casually mentioned by neighboring yeomen, the listener said, Ah, Clym Yeobright: what is he doing now?' When the instinctive question about a person is, What is he doing? it is felt that he will not be found to be, like most of us, doing nothing in particular. There is an indefinite sense that he must be invading some region of singularity , good or bad. The devout home is that he is doing well. The secret faith is that he is making a mess of it...So the subject recurred: if he were making a fortune and a name, so much the better for him, if he were making a tragical figure in the world, so much the better for a narrative

~ Thomas Hardy

Be the thermostat in your community, the one who makes a change. Not the thermometer who, just watches

~ Mya Waechtler

All of them with their own lives, untouched by mine. Or each other's.

~ Simon Beckett

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.

~ Sherman Alexie

For every tree, we plant, we saves a life.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

In our modern religion there is a reticence in speaking of our personal relationship to Jesus which often causes great loss. We forget that the majority of men are guided more by emotions than by intellect: the heart is the great power by which they are meant to be influenced and molded.

~ Andrew Murray

The author concedes that the body of Christ may often judge wrongly , but he says that the judgment of the body as a whole is more sound that is one's ability to judge self objectively.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience—much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens.

~ Charles Murray

Life is hard. Find some really good people to walk through it with. It makes things a little easier.

~ Andrena Sawyer

In addition to an open heart and open mind, I also brought (to the small group Bible study) an open mouth.

~ John Kasich

Talk helps shape one's thoughts.

~ David Mccullough

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.

~ Christine Pohl

Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, We all do.

~ Bill Bryson

A steady exposure to distant human need that is beyond our personal response can gradually inoculate us against particular action. . . Isolation from local need, and overexposure to overwhelming but distant need, make our responses to strangers uncertain and tentative at best.We need to find or create contemporary equivalents of the city gate, community rituals, and small group meetings in which we can build preliminary relations with strangers.

~ Christine Pohl

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.

~ Chris Matakas

We are a reminder to ourselves and others that we, as individuals and as a community, are stronger than we could have ever known until the moment we endured more than we previously thought possible.

~ Elaina Marie

Nearly half of all associational memberships are church-religious context. Religious worshipers and people who say religion is very important to them are much more likely than other persons to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups; professional and academic societies; school service groups; youth groups; service clubs; hobby or garden clubs; literary, art, discussion, and study groups; school fraternities and sororities; farm organization; political clubs; nationality groups; and other miscellaneous groups.

~ Robert Putnam

We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community... Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.

~ César Chávez

Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

~ C.s. Lewis

Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free. JFK

~ John F. Kennedy

The perfect state is one where men weep and rejoice over the same things.

~ Plato

When we establish human connections within the context of sharedexperience we create community wherever we go.

~ Gina Greenlee

Sartre felt that Hell is other people, but precisely the opposite is true. Hell is being left alone forever with no other reality than your own consciousness of yourself. It is being locked in a casket of your own internal chaos with no hope of a window, or door leading in light from outside to give you a moment's respite from yourself. Hell is the refusal of the gift of the other.

~ John Eldredge

Create your own community of liberation. From this moment on, direct your most concerted efforts, your best work, and your greatest feats of imagination toward creating the impossible community, and do so first of all precisely where you are, with those around you.

~ John P. Clark