Josiah Royce Quotes

Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

Put together all the existing families and you have society. It is as simple as that. Whatever kind of training took place in the individual family will be reflected in the kind of society that these families create.

All organizations are merely conceptual embodiments of a very old, very basic idea - the idea of community. They can be no more or less than the sum of the beliefs of the people drawn to them; of their character, judgements, acts and efforts.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

I'll always stand by my Gypsy roots, and I'll always help out one of my own.

For traditional societies … the collective, the group, is more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.

The instinctive need to be the member of a closely knit group fighting for common ideals may grow so strong that it becomes inessential what these ideals are

Society is one word, but many things.

You can’t throw a park down and think everybody is going to mix and be happy and share picnic tables and sing songs together.

A national festival is an occasion to refine and rebuild the national character.

Cinema is a great binding force for a nation.

Without art, you don't have society. It underpins so much.

In South Africa, we kind of like looking for things that unite people in big, big groups.

I'm interested in the ongoing war between the individual and community. That inner dissent against whatever group is surrounding you. No one wants to cede their selfhood to a group, right? And yet no one can exactly live outside the group, either. Even the most obstinate survivalist probably lives in some telepathic communion with all the other obstinate survivalists out there in the woods.

Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.

We in Europe need to discuss how we can improve the community. That is the correct order.

A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.

Man is a social animal formed to please in society.

Human beings need community. If there are no communities available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities... Only the social sector, that is, the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, can create what we now need, communities for citizens... What the dawning 21st century needs above all is equally explosive growth of the nonprofit social sector in building communities in the newly dominant social environment, the city.

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them.

A leader is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals and a people reverts to a mob.

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.

You have to be really careful to watch out for the difference between banding together, and being grouped together by people who don't understand you.

You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.

Tribes makes our lives better, and leading a tribe is the best life of all.