Community

For the TV show, see Community (TV series).

A community is a group of interacting people living in a common location. The word is often used to refer to a group that is organized around common values, and is associated with social cohesion within a shared geographical location.

Quotes

• It is in this wrestling that Jacob 'prevails with God', and realises that he has seen God face to face. He has overcome not God but his own rivalry. After this mysterious struggle he was able to recognise his wrongdoing and look his brother Esau in the face. Thus he was able to learn to live in peace with his brother—and become Israel, a community of brethren.
  • James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: fragments catholic and gay. New York: Crossroad, 2001. 76.

• A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.
  • Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House (1969), "The Loss of the Future"

• Man is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude. He combines with other men because isolation endangers him, and because there are many things that can be done better together than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against the world.
  • Will Durant, The Story of Civilization: Part 1 – Our Oriental Heritage (1935), Chapter 3, Section 1

• Theological condemnation of others, which breaks off fellowship in either judgment or contempt, is impermissible.
  • Ernst Käsemann, describing Paul's view, Commentary on the Romans (1980), p. 369

• When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city ?
  Do you huddle close together because you love each other?"
  What will you answer? "We all dwell together
  To make money from each other"? or "This is a community"?
  • T. S. Eliot, The Rock (1934)

• The greater the readiness to subordinate purely personal interests, the higher rises the ability to establish comprehensive communities... This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise of every truly human culture.
  • Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter 11, Ralph Manheim translation

• I think that individual voices are not as strong as a community of voices. If we can make a community of voices, then we can speak more truth. Also in a community, we learn to listen
  • Maxine Hong Kingston “’I Can Write My Shadow’: Alexis Cheung Interviews Maxine Hong Kingston” in Los Angeles Review of Books (2016 Dec 22)

• A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
  • Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People (1882), Billing, Act I

• Without community there is no liberation.
  • Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114. 2007

• Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood.
  • Rollo May, Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 12: Toward New Community

• The brotherhood of the community is indeed the ground in which the individual is ethically realized. But the community is the frustration as well as the realization of individual life. Its collective egotism is an offense to his conscience; its institutional injustices negate the ideal of justice; and such brotherhood as it achieves is limited by ethnic and geographic boundaries.
  • Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (1941)

• Anyone who says that society can be run on the basis of everyone's trying to maximize his own greed is talking total nonsense. And to teach it in schools, and to go on television and call it the American way of life still doesn't make it true. Competition and envy cannot become the basis of any society or any community.
  • Carroll Quigley, Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

• Nations had risen against nations, employing the subtlest devices of mechanism and mind to waste, and excruciate, and overthrow. The great community of mankind had been subdivided into ten thousand communities, each organized for the ruin of the other.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Essay on Christianity (1859)

• Education is the preparation of the individual for the community, and his religious training is the core of that preparation. With the great intellectual restatements and expansions of the nineteenth century, an educational break-up, a confusion and loss of aim in education, was inevitable. We can no longer prepare the individual for a community when our ideas of a community are shattered and undergoing reconstruction.
  • H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (1920), "The Possible Unification of Men's Wills in Political Matters"

• As a community goes so goes the nation.
  • Encyclopedia Brittanica; Despotism (film, 1946)