Human Communities Quotes

Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households. ~ Wendell Berry

It shouldn't surprise us that members of the same culture that gave us capitalism as the dominant economic model - based as it is on the insane notion that selfish individuals all attempting to maximally exploit each other will somehow create stable and healthy human communities (never mind that it never has and functionally cannot) - would give us variants of the selfish gene theory as the dominant biological model - based as it is on the equally insane notion that selfish individuals all attempting to maximally exploit each other will somehow create stable and healthy natural communities (never mind that it never has and functionally cannot). Both are justifications for what the dominant culture does: steal from everyone else. Absent ~ Derrick Jensen

Death Valley wasn't dead at all. It was asleep. It was simply waiting for the conditions of growth. When the conditions came, life returned to the heart of Death Valley.
Human beings and human communities are the same. We need the right conditions for growth, in our schools, businesses, and communities, and in our individual lives. If the conditions are right, people grown in synergy with the people around them and the environments they create. If the conditions are poor, people protect themselves and their anxieties from neighbors and the world. Some of the elements of our growth are inside us. They include the need to develop our unique natural aptitudes and personal passions. Finding and nurturing them is the surest way to ensure our growth and fulfillment a as individuals. ~ Ken Robinson

With full responsibility for my words as a professional biologist, I do not hesitate to say that all existing and genuine knowledge about the way in which the physical characteristics of human communities are related to their cultural capabilities can be written on the back of a postage stamp. ~ Lancelot Hogben

Now, more than ever, human communities depend on a diversity of talents; not on a singular conception of ability. ~ Ken Robinson

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude ... ~ Albert Einstein

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

Out of town I could simply be, I could feel my self, firm and calm and unmalleable as I could not when I was in school or in any of the usual human communities that seemed to weaken or scatter me. I could sit for an hour in the rocks above the Knife River, asking for no more discourse than that water's monotonous gabble. I was an inward child, it was true, but beyond that, I felt a contentment outside human society that I couldn't feel within it. ~ Larry Watson

Taking the Bible seriously should mean taking politics seriously. The major voices in the Bible from beginning to end are passionate advocates of a different kind of world here on earth and here and now. Many American Christians are wary of doing this, for more than one reason. Some are so appalled by the politics of the Christian Right that they have rejected the notion that Christianity has anything to do with politics. Moreover, the word "politics" has negative associations in our time. Many think of narrowly partisan politics, as if politics is merely about party affiliation. Many also dismiss politics as petty bickering, as ego-driven struggles for power, even as basically corrupt. But there is a broader meaning of the word that is essential. This broader meaning is expressed by the linguistic root of the English word. It comes from the Greek word polis, which means "city." Politics is about the shape and shaping of "the city" and by extension of large-scale human communities: kingdoms, nations, empires, the world. In this sense, politics matters greatly: it is about the structures of a society. Who rules? In whose benefit? What is the economic system like? - fair, or skewed toward the wealthy and powerful? What are the laws and conventions of the society like? Hierarchical? Patriarchal? Racist? Xenophobic? Homophobic? For Christians, especially in a democratic society in which they are a majority, these questions matter. To abandon politics means leaving the structuring ~ Marcus J. Borg

Ideas and statutes that live only in disembodied intellect are fragile, easily manipulated by both sides in a debate. This is as true of European "sustainability" regulations as it is for Amazonian súmac káusai removed from its forest home. Knowledge gained through extended bodily relationship with the forest, including the forest's human communities, is more robust.
... There is truth that cannot be accessed through intellect alone, especially intellect that is not aware of local ecological variations. ~ David George Haskell

Nobody's going to fix the world for us, but working together, making use of technological innovations and human communities alike, we might just be able to fix it ourselves. ~ Jamais Cascio

Civilization is complex. It involves the existence of human communities characterized by political and social organization; dominating and utilizing natural forces; adapting themselves to this new man-made environment; possessing true knowledge (empirical science), a natural sense of refinement, of the arts, and sciences; and most importantly, composed of individuals capable of sustaining this elaborate complex and of handing it on to a capable and similarly complex posterity. Moreover, this last consideration is, in fact, the heart of the whole matter. ~ Frank L. DeSilva

We do not need to invent sustainable human communities. We can learn from societies that have lived sustainably for centuries. We can also model communities after nature's ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. Since the outstanding characteristic of the biosphere is its inherent ability to sustain life, a sustainable human community must be designed in such a manner that its technologies and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature's inherent ability to sustain life. ~ Fritjof Capra

We should not be living in human communities that enclose tiny preserved ecosystems within them. Human communities should be maintained in small population enclaves within linked wilderness ecosystems. No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas. Communication systems can link the communities. ~ Paul Watson

We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work. ~ Wendell Berry

God designed in different faiths adored by different human communities are all limbs of the One God that really is. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

The north of peacebuilding is best articulated as finding our way toward becoming and being local and global human communities characterized by respect, dignity, fairness, cooperation, and the nonviolent resolution of conflict. To understand this north, to read such a compass, requires that we recognize and develop our moral imagination far more intentionally. ~ John Paul Lederach

All too often we fail to ask what we are trying to sustain. Ultimately, sustainability must be measured by the endurance of thriving human communities. ~ Barton Seaver

Richard Dawkins and his followers have recycled the theory of evolution not as a biological theory but as a theory of everything – of what the human being is, what human communities are, what our problems are and how they're not really our problems, but the problems of our genes: we're simply answers that our genes have come up with, and it's rather awful to be the answer to someone else's question, especially when that thing is not a person at all. Nevertheless people swallow that. ~ Roger Scruton

Country' and 'city' are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of human communities. In English, 'country' is both a nation and a part of a 'land'; 'the country' can be the whole society or its rural area. In the long history of human settlements, this connection between the land from which directly or indirectly we all get our living and the achievements of human society has been deeply known. ~ Raymond Williams

This Son is a god who walked, a pedestrian god - and in a hot place, at that - with a stride like any human stride, the sandal reaching just above the rocks along the way; and when He splurged on transportation, it was a regular donkey. This Son is a god who died in three hours, with moans, gasps and laments. What kind of a god is that? What is there to inspire in this Son? Love, said Father Martin. ~ Yann Martel

In the end, all our bodies will turn to dust. But our spirit, our work, and the memories we leave behind can outlast us. That's true whether you're famous or not. Perhaps it's part of the beauty of being human: living with the inevitability of our demise, but striving to create something that survives. ~ Bess Lovejoy

If every human being disappeared off the face of the earth in an instant, the earth would still keep spinning and the planet would develop new life forms. ~ Graham Nash

Now it is human nature to want to eat to ones fill when hungry, to want to warm up when cold, to want to rest when tired. These all are a part of people's emotional nature. ~ Xun Zi

I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being. ~ Jackie Robinson

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings. ~ Dave Barry

Morino and I found strange cases – and the people involved in them – darkly fascinating. Tragic human death ought to have torn our hearts in two – deaths so unfair that they made people want to scream. But we cut those articles out of newspapers, looking down the deep, dark well at the hearts of the people involved.

Most people wouldn't understand such interests – but it bewitched us like magic. ~ Otsuichi

The Robot With Human Hair Pt2"

Said it's the coming of man
And I forget when you went away
Like a kick to the face
Not winning the race
(Lion, I've seen you from afar)
I've seen her in the car
Knowing that you deserve such more
Deserved to know you're free

Leave, I'm the director
Agree to the role of the pilot inspector
Breathe, pilot inspector
Feed off the role of the radar detector
Leave, I'm the director
Agree to the role of the pilot inspector
Breathe, pilot inspector
Feed off the role of the radar detector

Well, then, you said you could do this on your own
I'm sorry baby, I can't aid you
(And then you say, hands down, right now, I'll let this go)
You...
Well, now it's up to god to save you

Save you from all of those bruised,
bruised and battered wounds
(Wave right with a gun in his hand wave right)
Can you taste this blood
Dripping sweeter than...?
And over your eyes
And I, and I fall to both knees
Not to beg for your forgiveness
But to hate the word
And you speak

Take a right off these cliffs
The ground is staring at your wounded weapons
Wounded weapons
(And I can't believe that you're right)
You can bank the night on this its round
And glaring at your well
I get hyphy
Tell 'em I get hyphy

And this is where it ends

Well, then, ~ Dance Gavin Dance

What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know the answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life. ~ Albert Einstein

This was what the universities were turning out nowadays. The science-is-a-sacred-cow boys. People who believe you could pour mankind into a test-tube and titrate it, and come up with all the answers to the problems of the human race. ~ Frank M. Robinson

The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history. ~ Alan Moore

God does communicate with those who are willing to obey Him. He penetrates the dark silence with free, life-giving discoveries in nature, the human conscience, Scripture, and the Person of Jesus Christ. ~ Billy Graham

The human mind generates an auric field that covers up naturalness, innate divinity of life. That auric field is a field of doubt. ~ Frederick Lenz

Dive deeply into the miracle of life and let the tips of your wings be burnt by the flame, let your feet be lacerated by the thorns, let your heart be stirred by human emotion, and let your soul be lifted beyond the earth. ~ Vilayat Inayat Khan

A man of letters is often a man with two natures,
one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly. ~ Edwin Percy Whipple

When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snowfields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, 'Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.' Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels 'the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech' in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts. ~ Ernest Shackleton

The total ugliness and indifference of the worst features of the human race come out in their driving habits. ~ Charles Bukowski

The banker didn't seem convinced - but then, in Wayne's estimation, he didn't seem completely human either. He was at least part dolphin. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Nice to know a few things aren't in the government's files,' he said, opening the front door and stepping out ahead of her. The human courtesy of waiting for the woman to go through a door was all flourish, no sense. If any danger waited on the other side of a door, he'd rather meet it himself, not send her into it. ~ Eileen Wilks

When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed. ~ Margaret Mead

Today, the best way to communicate with someone is still face-to-face. Virtual reality has the potential to change that, to make it where VR communication is as good or better than face-to-face communications, because not only do you get all the same human cues as real-world communication, you basically suspend the laws of physics, you can do whatever you want, you can be wherever you want. ~ Palmer Luckey

We have both been given the same wish to survive, We are all, you see, toys of the life-force. It made you numerically stronger, but mentally undeveloped. It made us mentally strong but physically weak: now it has set us at one another, to see what will happen. A cruel sport perhaps, from both our points of view, but a very very old one. Cruelty is as old as life itself. There is some improvement: humour and compassion are the most important of human inventions; but they are not very firmly established yet, though promising well. But the life-force is a lot stronger than they are; and it won't be denied its blood-sports. ~ John Wyndham

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions. ~ Robert Wilson Lynd

Life is not just eating, drinking, television and cinema ... The human mind must be creative, must be self-generating ; it cannot depend on just gadgets to amuse itself. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

What a piece of work is man! ~ William Shakespeare

I hand her the coffee. She gives it a sip, then nods in approval. I do a little fist pump, officially becoming a less odious human being than the man who wants to build a wall between Mexico and the US. ~ Beth O'Leary

The human sigh for peace and love is answered and compensated by divine love. ~ Mary Baker Eddy

I ponder of something terrifying
'Cause this time there's no sound to hide behind
I find over the course of our human existence
One thing consists of consistence
And it's that we're all battling fear
Oh dear, I don't know if we know why we're here
Oh my, too deep, please stop thinking ~ Twenty One Pilots

It didn't take long. In that despondent changeless heat the entire human content of the ship congealed into a massive drunkenness. People moved flabbily about like squid in a tank of tepid smelly water. From that moment on we saw, rising to the surface, the terrifying nature of white men, exasperated, freed from constraint, absolutely unbuttoned, their true nature, same as in the war. That tropical steam bath called forth the instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the fissured walls of prisons. In the European cold, under gray, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to see our brothers' festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface. That's when the frantic unbuttoning sets in, when filth triumphs and covers us entirely. It's a biological confession. Once work and cold weather cease to constrain us, once they relax their grip, the white man shows you the same spectacle as a beautiful beach when the tide goes out: the truth, fetid pools, crabs, carrion, and turds. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

What do we really want to say to the world? Three main themes. The inability to find completion in our modern society, the inability to find completion within ourselves, and the new way to be human in what Christ offers us - His love and His perfect plan of redemption for us. ~ Jon Foreman

The human body is not made to endure all the years that one may live ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I like real problems, the human condition - twisted, darker stuff. ~ Drea De Matteo

Why am I angry? Every morning, I wake up, I open my eyes, remember who and what I am and I say, "Yuck." Then I go about my day, and when it's over, I get back in bed, put a sheet between my sweaty legs and, as I drift off, looking back on a day of being this shitbag of a human, I mutter to myself, "Jesus Christ. ~ Louis C.K.

Human development, not secularization, is what's key to women's empowerment in the transforming Middle East. ~ Dalia Mogahed

We try to place the human body in relation to the image all the time, so it's never a kind of a backdrop, but it's more of ... a much more integrative experience. ~ Simon McBurney

Love each and love all. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I love working with horses. People say you shouldn't work with animals and children; that's wrong. You must only work with children, because you only work eight hours a day and I love working with animals. Animals have an honesty that human beings reach to find in their lives at the best of times. ~ Colin Farrell

I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this
which is wha makes it essential. ~ David Shields

I feel worn down as a human being who has to constantly justify their existence to other human beings because I'm a minority ~ Killer Mike

Solitude The creation of an open, empty space in our lives by purposefully abstaining from interaction with other human beings, so that, freed from competing loyalties, we can be found by God The ~ Richard J. Foster

My idea of marriage, as of every other partnership, ... is that each member shall contribute to it his or her personality, unrepressed and uncoerced. Thus, and only thus, we obtain the most complex synthesis possible, which may well surpass in beauty, as it surely does in interest and human value, the separate elements of such an association. ~ Phyllis Bentley

A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity. ~ William James

I knew that a group of tigers was called a streak. I knew that dolphins were carnivores. I knew that giraffes had four stomachs and that the leg muscles of a locust were a thousand times more powerful than the same weight of human muscle. I knew that white polar bears had black skin beneath their fur, and that jellyfish had no brains. I ~ Jodi Picoult