Community

“ And have not I, more than once, heard your Majesty express the wish and the hope for “a community on earth in which all the members should have equal opportunity for the attainment of virtue, knowledge, a life of activity and prosperity: a community in which goodness and capacity should constitute the highest aristocracy, and in which the highest rank should depend upon the highest human worth?” ”

“ The more of true human life each member of a community receives, or the more each one suffers himself to be governed by the highest good and truth, the more orderly, industrious, united, healthy, and happy is that community. The more truly human does it become in its form, organization, and activities. ”

“ We have now seen, gentlemen, two periods of the world, each of which is dominated by the ruling idea of a particular class of the community which impresses its own principle on all the social arrangements of its time. ”

“ The community, then, is the name that we give to this larger and most inclusive social milieu, outside of ourselves, our family, and our immediate neighborhood, in which the individual maintains not merely his existence as an individual, but his life as a person. ”

“ In other words, as I use the term community, one of the autonomic groups into which the race is divided is intended; and as I use the term state, the governing entity of such a group is intended. By individual ideals, as I shall use that term, the opinions an individual forms as to what he should do or omit to promote his own welfare and that of the human race is intended; and by community ideals, the opinions a community forms as to what it should do to promote its welfare and that of the individuals of whom it is composed. ”

“ These communities shall have their proud circles. They shall have families joined hand in hand, to the end that new blood and new thoughts be constantly brought in, and no good force or leaven be lost. The country community shall awaken illustrious. ”

“ I seek to describe its people as I saw them,—clear-headed, energetic, frank, and hospitable; a community suited to, and labouring for, their country's advancement, rather than for their own present comfort. ”

“ This whole machine can be understood perhaps more clearly by comparing it to a community of people. In any community,—Church, State, institution, or household,—just so far as each member minds his own business, does his own individual work for himself and for those about him, and does not officiously interfere with the business of others, the community is quiet, orderly, and successful. ”

“ The community, including the family, with its wider interests, its larger purposes, and its more deliberate aims, surrounds us, incloses us, and compels us to conform; not by mere pressure from without, not by the fear of censure merely, but by the sense of our interest in, and responsibility to, certain interests not our own. ”

“ This conception of the community as a vital common possession explains the relation of religious, educational, ethical, economic institutions to one another. The community is the clearing-house of all these influences. It is the medium by which they exchange [Pg 93] with one another, in the interest of human life. The perfection of this exchange and the abundance of communal influences makes the community good and desirable, or poor and undesirable.
Sometimes one says that the community is "a good place to live in." ”

“ If you can once see that a working majority is obtained for the handsome passions, for the feelings that draw us together, rather than for the feelings that separate us, then you have laid the foundation of a community and a free government and, therefore, if you can do nothing else in the community center than draw men together so that they will have common feeling, you will have set forward the cause of civilization and the cause of human freedom. ”

“ I was merely contending that a community of comparatively poor people who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow—tilling the soil and possessed of high ideals of good citizenship—such people beyond question afford the greatest example of contentment, morality and happiness. ”

“ I am well aware of the nature of the community to whose serious consideration I now wish to commend that conversation—I know it to be a community which is striving to educate and enlighten its members on a scale so magnificently out of proportion to its size that it must put all larger cities to shame. ”

“ You have a community?
—We are in the last class at college, but now that we have come to the forest and we live all together in the same place, we call our group a community. We have everything in common. ”

“ I can conceive a community, to-day and here, in which, on a sufficient scale, the perfect personalities, without noise meet; say in some pleasant western settlement or town, where a couple of hundred best men and women, of ordinary worldly status, have by luck been drawn together, with nothing extra of genius or wealth, but virtuous, chaste, industrious, cheerful, resolute, friendly and devout. ”

“ Look, for example, at the great mass of your populace in town and country—a tremendous proportion of the whole community! Are their bodily wants better, or more easily supplied? Are they subject to fewer calamities? Are they happier in childhood, youth, and manhood, and more comfortably or carefully provided for in old age, than when the land was unenclosed, and half covered with woods? ”

“ Here a word must be said about the subjective aspect of society, which, in its objective aspect, as we have seen, is merely the struggle and process of adjustment. What is the relation of adjustment to sympathy and to understanding, to communication and to concerted purpose, to the evolution of a social constraint through which the community controls and shapes the individual, to cooperation and to social organization? ”

“ Let every man and woman be industrious, prudent, and economical in their acts and feelings, and while gathering to themselves, let each one strive to identify his or her interests with the interests of this community, with those of their neighbor and neighborhood, let them seek their happiness and welfare in that of all, and we will be blessed and prospered. ”

“ Meanwhile, the community is wheeling around over our heads high in air; they see us now, plainly enough, ensconced behind our pine-tree ambuscade, and are forming their own conclusions as to the morality of our proceedings. ”

“ As he grows, the community in which he lives pours itself into his being in the language he learns and the social atmosphere he breathes, so that the content of his being implies in its every fibre relations of community. He is what he is by including in his essence the relations of the social State.... ”

“ The interest of the community at large in the subject is deep-rooted and wide-branching. It ramifies in every direction, and its fruits enter daily into the affairs of persons in all conditions of life. ”

“ There will be found in every progressive community societies and organisations which represent a far higher level of public spirit and enterprise than that possessed or displayed by such communities in their collective capacity. ”

“ They suggest that a community may with advantage consider its affairs from two points of view—through the eyes of a body elected to represent trades, industries, professions, public services, and the like, a body representing function, and through the eyes of a second body elected by localities to represent communities. ”

“ But I would like to suggest to you that every political community and neighborhood has a character of its own, a moral character, as well as every man and every woman, and it is exceedingly important, looked at even from the side of material advantage, that our communities should maintain a good reputation for social order, intelligence, virtue, and a faithful and willing obedience to law. ”

“ Preface Every man, as a member of some community or association, has certain obligations and certain rights, toward them and from them. The people are nothing else than a community founded on blood kinship, on a common origin, on common interests. ”

“ A modern community, not divided within itself by strong antipathies of race, language, or nationality, may be considered as in the main divisible into two sections, which, in spite of partial variations, correspond on the whole with two divergent directions of apparent interest. ”

“ The weaving of mankind into one community does not imply the creation of a homogeneous community, but rather the reverse; the welcome and the adequate utilization of distinctive quality in an atmosphere of understanding. ”

“ In any large community we may see, as between different classes and groups, differences of the same kind as those which exist between communities which we speak of as differing in civilization—differences of knowledge, belief, customs, tastes, and speech, which in their extremes show among people of the same race, living in the same country, differences almost as great as those between civilized and savage communities. ”

“ You must take the community just as it is, and make the best of it. You wish to obtain its confidence; there is a short rule for doing this which you will find useful,—deserve it. But, to deserve it in full measure, you must unite many excellences, natural and acquired. ”

“ In community after community, in every field of endeavor from sports and education to business and religion, we discovered organizations and programs that have succeeded in bridging gaps between people of different races and cultures. ”

“ But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims, and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest good. ”

“ But they are also interested, and chiefly interested upon the whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking part in conjoint and coöperative doings. Otherwise, no such thing as a community would be possible. ”

“ Besides, the community has come clearly to feel within itself, and has clearly and forcibly expressed the same in word and deed, that it is the duty of the State so to provide for every individual member that he may become a perfected human being. ”

“ It is everywhere asserted in eighteenth-century terms that the new community is to be—to use the phraseology we have introduced in an earlier chapter—a community of will and not a community of obedience. ”

“ When our relation to the community is fully realized, it will be seen that the health, the happiness, and the consequent powers of every individual, concern not only his own life, but also affect the whole community of which he is a member. ”

“ From this condition of affairs there has gradually been developed the modern social arrangement, by which each individual helps to carry out some distinctly special part of work for the community—be it wheat-growing, cloth-weaving, bricklaying, or the arresting of burglars—and trusts to the community for his requirements in all other directions. ”

“ But if you start from a place with understanding around belonging and understanding about community norms and behavior, then you can actually start to bring people back into those community behaviors. And so I’m hopeful that, based on the fact that we have a sense of commitment to norms and behaviors around what we want in the community, it’s about strengthening them, and seeing them succeed. ”

“ Importance of social environment I take the explanation of the differences that distinguish communities to be this: That each society, small or great, necessarily weaves for itself a web of knowledge, beliefs, customs, language, tastes, institutions and laws. Into the web woven by each society (or rather, into these webs, for each community above the simplest is made up of minor societies that overlap and interlace each other) the individual is received at birth and continues until his death. ”

“ The perfect concord of the community demands among all its members an equal division of strength and talent, of taste and capacity for work. This condition, which perhaps is the most important of all, is fulfilled preeminently. ”

“ Moreover, the satisfaction of all wants in the community itself is a moral gain. If individuals live this life in the bounds to which their group and family associations are confined, the steadying [Pg 87] influence of society is at its greatest. ”

“ No doubt the higher the life we secure to the individual by wise social organization, the greater his value is to the community, and the more pains we shall take to pull him through any temporary danger or disablement. ”

“ A community thus presents an order of energies transmuted into one of meanings which are appreciated and mutually referred by each to every other on the part of those engaged in combined action. “Force” is not eliminated but is transformed in use and direction by ideas and sentiments made possible by means of symbols. ”

“ A community where all the property belongs to the government, and to which every man contributes by his labour, that he may have his own wants supplied; a domestic society which very much resembles a great public school, and converts a citizen, through all the gradations of his existence, from form to form; and where every man, like an automatical machine, must be fixed in his proper place,—supposes a society of passionless beings which social life has never shown, and surely never can. ”

“ And so the form or order of that community becomes more and more human. All its corporate acts express more and more faithfully the human thoughts and feelings with which the minds of its individual members are imbued. Such community is in the human form, therefore, just so far as the individual minds composing it are truly human. It is the tendency of true human life, wherever it exists, to mould the collective as well as the individual man into a corresponding human form. ”