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Community is a condition of shared attitudes, interests, values and benefits

• Community: The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common. Oxford Dictionary
• Community: A group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society.  Merriam Webster
• Community:  A social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists.  Dictionary.com
• Let’s create an integrated global community where we have shared benefits and responsibilities, and we don’t fight because of our differences. Bill Clinton
• Oneness,  Unity,  Connectedness,  Hospitality
• Values to live by,  Paths to happiness and fulfilment

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Community is a pooling of strength and a sharing of work and responsibility

• One of the marvellous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn’t as individuals. When we pool our strength, and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress, and perhaps help them find self-confidence and inner healing. Jean Vanier
• Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free. Starhawk

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Community is mutual caring, sharing and trust

• When people have all the material things they need, they seem not to need each other. They are self- sufficient. There is no interdependence. There is no love. In a poor community, however, there is often a lot of mutual help and sharing of goods, as well as help from outside. Poverty can even become a cement of unity. Jean Vanier
• Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community.  Anthony D’Angelo
• For a community to be whole and healthy, it must be based on people’s love and concern for each other. Millard Fuller
• 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
• Caring,  Sharing,  Trust

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Community is recognising our mutual interdependence

• Our mission in this new century is clear. For good or ill, we live in an interdependent world. We can’t escape each other. Therefore, we have to spend our lives building a global community of shared responsibilities, shared values, shared benefits. Bill Clinton
• Let’s face it. In most of life we really are interdependent. We need each other. Staunch independence is an illusion, but heavy dependence isn’t healthy, either. The only position of long-term strength is interdependence: win/win. Greg Anderson
• Life doesn’t make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all. Erik Erikson
• As Walker relates, His Holiness was talking about the myth of independence. If you are so independent, he asked, who grows your food? Who sews your clothes, builds your house, makes sure that water comes out of your showerhead? How were you even born? The fact is, he said, we have not done one single thing alone, without the help of a small army of others, and yet we walk around talking about the necessity and supremacy of independence. It’s completely irrational. Jean Twenge & Keith Campbell
• We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. George Bernard Shaw
• Talking about independence makes me wonder, Who is truly independent in this world? A farmer who grows food is dependent on a baker, a barber, a doctor, and so on. A doctor is dependent on other people of different professions in order to survive. I am dependent and will be dependent on certain caregivers and therapists. Those caregivers and therapists need people like me to earn their bread and butter and draw their salaries. So no one is doing any favours when choosing whatever his means of livelihood is. Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay
• Interdependence,  Connectedness

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Community is recognising we need each other

• The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration. Pearl S. Buck
• Independence”… middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. George Bernard Shaw
• Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God. Aristotle
• In reality, there is no such thing as a “self-made man.” We got where we are with the support and actions of others. In fact, we have an interconnectedness that is so pervasive it’s easy to overlook. Mary Rosendale
• No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  John Donne
• A hundred times a day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depends on the labor of other people, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. Albert Einstein
• Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else.  Nothing exists in isolation.  We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.  Margaret J. Wheatley
• If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth. Mitsugi Saotome
• Human needs

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Community is recognising we are here to help each other

• Instead one bends every effort to help life to fulfil its highest destiny. One strives to maintain, enhance, and assist life to make the most of itself. Wilferd A. Peterson
• Life to too short not to create, not to love, and not to lend a helping hand to our brothers and sisters. Eric Maisel
• Life’s most persistent and urgent question is what are you doing for others.  Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them. The Dalai Lama
• The purpose of life is not to be happy – but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all. Leo Rosten
• There is no more noble occupation in the world than to assist another human being – to help someone succeed. Alan Loy McGinnis
• We are here to help one another along life’s journey.  William J. Bennett
• What do we live for, if not to make the world less difficult for each other? George Eliot
• There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life. Booker T. Washington
• Every life is meant to help all lives; each man should live for all men’s betterment. Alice Cary
• In the time we have it is surely our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can. William Barclay
• The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbor. Hubert Humphrey
• Helpfulness

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Community is recognising we are all part of the whole

• People may be said to resemble not the bricks of which a house is built, but the pieces of a picture puzzle, each differing in shape, but matching the rest, and thus bringing out the picture. Felix Adler
• The process of expanding identification is not merely psychological but is grounded in reality. The process of identification is possible because there is an underlying whole of which we are, each of us, a part. Arne Naess
• Oneness

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Community is recognising everyone is connected

• Everything is alive; everything is interconnected. Cicero
• Every measured thing is part of a web of variables more richly interconnected than we know. Garrett Hardin
• We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibres connect us with our fellow men. Herman Melville
• Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. Leibniz
• All human beings are interconnected, one with all other elements in creation. Henry Reed
• This we know: All things are connected like the blood that unites us. We did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.  Chief Seattle
• We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically. Neil deGrasse Tyson
• No part of the human community can live entirely on its own planet, with its own laws of motion and cut off from the rest of humanity. Hugo Chavez
• We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone … and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something. Sandra Day O’Connor
• Connectedness

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Community is recognising we exist only through relationships with other people or things

• Everything, including all people, exists only through relationships with other people or things. Nothing exists in isolation or absolute independence.  No person, or thing can arise of, for, or by its own accord.  Everything is interdependent.  Taro Gold

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Community is recognising we’re all in the same boat

• We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty G.K. Chesterton
• You cannot sink someone else’s end of the boat and still keep your own afloat. Charlie Brower

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Community is recognising our destinies are bound up in one another’s

• If we could but recognize our common humanity, that we do belong together, that our destinies are bound up in one another’s, that we can be free only together, that we can be human only together, then a glorious world would come into being where all of us lived harmoniously together as members of one family, the human family. Desmond Tutu
• All life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• We cannot build our own future without helping others to build theirs. Bill Clinton
• Destiny

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Community is recognising we are here for the sake of each other

• From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other – above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labours of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received. Albert Einstein
• Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality—not as we expect it to be but as it is—is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love. Frederick Buechner

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Community is recognising our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others

• Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others’ actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities. For this reason, it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others. Tenzin Gyatso
• Happiness

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Community is recognising all great accomplishments and undertakings are joint efforts

• …I have seen that in any great undertaking it is not enough for a man to depend simply upon himself. Lone Man
• No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you. Althea Gibson
• Every successful individual knows that his or her achievement depends on a community of persons working together. Paul Ryan
• We exist as a community, yet we achieve as a team. Boris Pluskowski
• What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another. Harold Kushner

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Community is about mutual enquiry and sharing truth

• If we regard truth as something handed down from authorities on high, the classroom [or office] will look like a dictatorship. If we regard truth as a fiction determined by personal whim, the classroom will look like anarchy.  If we regard truth as emerging from a complex process of mutual inquiry, the classroom will look like a resourceful and interdependent community.  Parker J. Palmer
• We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth.  Parker Palmer
• Truth

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Community holds much power for good

• I still have great faith in democracy. I have great belief in the power of community. Terry Tempest Williams
• There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about. Margaret J. Wheatley
• In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it. Marianne Williamson
• Goodness,  Virtue

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A healthy community provides a sense of belongingness and offsets loneliness

• Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging.  Yet today the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the techno-societies.  The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.  Alvin Toffler
• Cut off is our customary state of being. But there is within us the constant yearning for connectedness, a yearning–“Ah!– to live without the slightest partition between our souls and the distant stars, between ourselves and the world’s otherness.  We yearn for community with each other because we know that with it we would feel more at home in our lives, no longer strangers to one another and aliens to the earth.  Parker J. Palmer
• We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. Dorothy Day
• 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
• We can never get a re-creation of community and heal our society without giving our citizens a sense of belonging. Patch Adams
• Loneliness

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Interest and enthusiasm are the wellspring of community life

• Interest and enthusiasm are the wellspring of continually evolving community life: they create bonds which unite us whether we are young or old, nearby or far from each other; they allow human warmth and love to be the formative forces in personal and community life and striving. Henning Hansmann
• Enthusiasm

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A healthy community answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members

• A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members – among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy. Wendell Berry
• We live in a community of people not so that we can suppress and dominate each other or make each other miserable but so that we can better and more reliably satisfy all life’s healthy needs. Wilhelm Reich
• A community is a group of people who have come together, and they work and they live to try and improve the standard of living and quality of life – and I don’t mean money. William Baldwin

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A healthy community nourishes love

• We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. Dorothy Day
• Community is a sign that love is possible in a materialistic world where people so often either ignore or fight each other. It is a sign that we don’t need a lot of money to be happy–in fact, the opposite. Jean Vanier
• For a community to be whole and healthy, it must be based on people’s love and concern for each other. Millard Fuller
• The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say, “What are you going through?” Simone Weil
• We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. Dorothy Day
• Love

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A healthy community promotes peace

• When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us. When our community is in a state of peace, it can share that peace with neighbouring communities. The Dalai Lama
• Peace is not just the absence of war, it is the active presence of a capacity for love and compassion, and reciprocity. It is an awareness that our lives are not to be lived simply for ourselves through expressing our individuality, but we confirm the purpose of our lives through the work of expressing our shared sense of community in a purposeful and practical way; to sustain our own lives we sustain the lives of others – in family, in a community of neighbourhoods called a city, and in a community of nations called the world. Dennis Kucinich
• There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community. M. Scott Peck
• World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor — it requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. John F. Kennedy
• There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community. M. Scott Peck
• Inner peace

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Being part of a cohesive community is good for your health

• Close family ties and a cohesive community turned out to be more important than health habits in predicting heart disease. Joan Borysenko
• I believe that the community – in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures – is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. Wendell Berry
• Health

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Community promotes companionship and friendship

• Loving friendships provide us with a space to experience the joy of community in a relationship where we learn to process all our issues, to cope with differences and conflict while staying connected. Bell Hooks
• How does one keep from “growing old inside”? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people…. Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable. Robert McAfee Brown
• Friendship

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Without genuine community, life becomes a struggle

• Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted “It takes a village”. David James Duncan

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Celebrate common community over egoism and individualism

• For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice. Erwin Schrodinger
• For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community. Joe Biden
• Individualistic material progress and the desire to gain prestige by coming out on top have taken over from the sense of fellowship, compassion and community. Now people live more or less on their own in a small house, jealously guarding their goods and planning to acquire more, with a notice on the gate that says, ‘Beware of the Dog. Jean Vanier
• There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good. Samuel Johnson
• Transcending the ego

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Make your ambition broad enough to include the needs of the community

• 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. Cesar Chavez

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Community is strengthened through tolerance

• Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing. Rollo May
• There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication…. Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing. John Dewey
• Tolerance

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Community is strengthened through communication

• How do we create a harmonious society out of so many kinds of people? The key is tolerance – the one value that is indispensable in creating community.  Barbara Jordan
• World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor — it requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. John F. Kennedy
• Communication

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Community is strengthened through an appreciation for diversity and differences

• I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort, where we overlap. Ani DiFranco
• Strength lies in differences, not in similarities. Stephen Covey
• If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear. Gene Roddenberry
• The old emphasis upon superficial differences that separate peoples must give way to education for citizenship in the human community. Norman Cousins
• Diversity

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Devote yourself to making a difference in your community, even if by small acts

• Go out and make a difference in your community. You don’t need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes and watch your heart start beating. Barbara Sher
• Let your one delight and refreshment be to pass from one service to the community to another, with God ever in mind. Marcus Aurelius
• A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm. Henrik Ibsen
• Many people are good at talking about what they are doing, but in fact do little. Others do a lot but don’t talk about it; they are the ones who make a community live. Jean Vanier
• Every human activity can be put at the service of the divine and of love. We should all exercise our gift to build community. Jean Vanier
• We can begin by doing small things at the local level, like planting community gardens or looking out for our neighbours. That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously. Grace Lee Boggs
• Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead
• I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. George Bernard Shaw
• Making a difference,  Service

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Contributing to your community gives life greater meaning and purpose

• The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning. Mitch Albom
• In our hectic, fast-paced, consumer-driven society, it’s common to feel overwhelmed, isolated and alone. Many are re-discovering the healing and empowering role that community can bring to our lives. The sense of belonging we feel when we make the time to take an active role in our communities can give us a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. Robert Alan Silverstein
• Meaning,  Purpose

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Contributing to your community is good for your health and happiness

• It seems that people who are the healthiest focus on developing satisfying personal relationships, growing as individuals, and contributing to their community. Surely, they also aspire to sufficient financial success to live comfortably. But wealth, fame, and beauty do not disproportionately occupy the consciousness of these people the way they dominate the experiences of individuals who are less psychologically stable. Edward L. Deci
• Not all goals lead to lasting feelings of true satisfaction and well- being. Which ones do? In general, goals that are about making, supporting, or strengthening relationships do. So do goals that focus on personal growth, physical health, or self- Goals that have to do with contributing to your community or helping others also fulfil these needs. Heidi Grant Halvorson
• Strong aspirations for any of the intrinsic goals—meaningful relationships, personal growth, and community contributions—were positively associated with well-being. Edward Deci
• Health,  Happiness

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A healthy community needs a soul

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

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Laws are just if made for the welfare of the community

• When…we, as individuals, obey laws that direct us to behave for the welfare of the community as a whole, we are indirectly helping to promote the pursuit of happiness by our fellow human beings. Aristotle
• Law; an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community.   Thomas Aquinas
• With all my heart, I believe that the world’s present system of sovereign nations can only lead to barbarism, war and inhumanity, and that only world law can assure progress towards a civilized peaceful community. Albert Einstein

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A thing is right when it preserves the wellbeing of the community

• When…we, as individuals, obey laws that direct us to behave for the welfare of the community as a whole, we are indirectly helping to promote the pursuit of happiness by our fellow human beings. Aristotle
• Every society, all government, and every kind of civil compact therefore, is or ought to be, calculated for the general good and safety of the community. George Mason
• The original of morals lies with the thought that the community is more valuable than the individual. John Carroll
• Well-being

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A healthy community needs new blood

• 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
• There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies. Winston Churchill

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Scarcity can cement community while too much surplus impoverishes it

• A community that is growing rich and seeks only to defend its goods and its reputation is dying. It has ceased to grow in love. A community is alive when it is poor and its members feel they have to work together and remain united, if only to ensure that they can all eat tomorrow! Jean Vanier
• When people have all the material things they need, they seem not to need each other. They are self- sufficient. There is no interdependence. There is no love. In a poor community, however, there is often a lot of mutual help and sharing of goods, as well as help from outside. Poverty can even become a cement of unity. Jean Vanier
• Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. If there is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other. Bill McKibben
• The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life. Wendell Berry

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Your family is the first community to which you’re attached

• The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society’s most basic values. Charles Colton
• Family

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Joining a spiritual community brings great benefits

• The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen. Together, our vision widens and strength is renewed. Mark Morrison-Reed

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Nowadays, community is online too

• We need to bridge our sense of loneliness and disconnection with a sense of community and continuity even if we must manufacture it from our time on the Web and our use of calling cards to connect long distance. We must “log on” somewhere, and if it is only in cyberspace, that is still far better than nowhere at all. Julia Cameron

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In many ways, we are defined by the communities we live in

• Most people don’t choose their value system – they simply inherit the beliefs of their parents and community. Jonathan Lockwood Huie
• Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to. Orson Scott Card

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The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong and we must sustain it

• The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence. Thomas Berry
• We can dream together a dream of a better world, an ever-renewing, organic-based earth-community. I believe we can achieve a large part of it in our lifetime. Randy Hayes
• We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. Aldo Leopold

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To talk about the interest of the community, we must understand the interest of the individual

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

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• Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two. Ambrose Bierce
• I’m often asked why I travel around the country talking politics: Is it for humanitarian reasons, community spirit or is it for the money, the limousines or the girls?  The answers are: no no yes yes yes!   Pat Paulsen
• If I have an orgasm, I feel that I have to give six weeks of community service to various charities.  Richard Lewis
• There’s an empty spot I’ve always had inside me. I tried to fill it with family religion, community service but those were dead ends! I think this chair is the answer.  Homer Simpson
• We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community but people wouldn’t obey the rules.  Alan Bennett

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