There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.
When we belong to a community and learn things that are no way related to our society, we live as unwanted entities in that society.
To live factionless Is not just to live in poverty and discomfort; it is to live divorced from society, separated from the most important thing in life: community. My mother once told me that we can’t survive alone,but even if we could, we wouldn’t want to. Without a faction, we have no purpose and no reason to live.
Meditation is not to get out of society, to escape from society, but to prepare for a reentery into society.
Prepare your hearts for Death's cold hand! prepare
Your souls for flight, your bodies for the earth;
Prepare your arms for glorious victory;
Prepare your eyes to meet a holy God!
Prepare, prepare!
You shouldn't get to live in society and give nothing back. People complain about their taxes, yet they do nothing for the community. That makes me furious.
We're not in control [of circumstances], but that does not mean we don't exercise a certain kind of conditioned agency. That's what it means to live in a community. That's what it means to live in society.
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.
Ants can live together in solidarity and forget themselves in the community. In a normative capitalist society, everyone is an egoist. In the ants' civilization, you are part of the group; you don't live for yourself alone.
In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.
...I am an outsider, a lesbian, a shikse. The Jewish community is not my community. But as a Jew--as a Jew in a Christian, anti-Semitic society--the Jewish community is, and will always remain, my community. Enemy and ally.
Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.
Death is more certain than the morrow, than night following day, than winter following summer. Why is it then that we prepare for the night and for the winter time, but do not prepare for death. We must prepare for death. But there is only one way to prepare for death - and that is to live well.
The people who care the most about the folks in your community are living in the community. They don't live in Washington, D.C.
My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.
I've spent my entire adult life involved in the community trying to help people live decent lives, working for a strong and secure state of Israel, and making sure that the most vulnerable in our society receive the care that they need.