E. B. White Quotes

Where is the man who owes nothing to the land in which he lives?

It is human nature to favor individuals and institutions who we know or for whom we feel responsible.

Growing up there was always a sense of 'We have so many gifts and we have to use that for the betterment of the planet.'

One person has a responsibility not just for himself but for inter-relationships with the existences of others and the world.

Really important issues are getting lost, so I can say I'm glad to be a citizen of the planet and do my part.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

When one neighbor helps another, we strengthen our communities.

Your connections with other people are important, our connection to the earth.

As Scots - like everyone else - we live in an increasingly inter-connected world that demands shared solutions to shared problems. Walking away from others have never been our way. Walking with others has been our heritage and still represents our best future.

It is crucial that we develop real awareness of ourselves as citizens of Earth, linked by mutual and indissoluble bonds. When we clearly recognize this reality and ground ourselves in it, we are compelled to take a strict accounting of our way of life.

Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial.

There's no such thing as an independent person.

There's something about being with a group of people who become like family that must be needed in society.

People need to be made conscious of a very simple reality: we have no choice but to share this planet, this small blue sphere floating in the vast reaches of space, with all of our fellow 'passengers.'

I think it's really important that we understand that we share this world and we're connected to it.

Most of my books have been about the complex ways an individual depends on community.

Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks.

People who volunteer at the recycling center or soup kitchen through a church or neighborhood group can come to feel part of something 'larger.' Such a sense of belonging calls on a different part of a self than the market calls on. The market calls on our sense of self-interest. It focuses us on what we 'get.'

When you live in a place, you're not just taking from it, you're contributing to it. In America I would never be able to make myself a person who could contribute. I wasn't interested in that society; I was interested in this society.

One's own self-worth is tied to the worth of the community to which one belongs, which is intimately connected to humanity in general. What happens in Darfur becomes an assault on my own community, and on me as an individual. That's what the human family is all about.

The great city can teach something that no university by itself can altogether impart: a vivid sense of the largeness of human brotherhood, a vivid sense of man's increasing obligation to man; a vivid sense of our absolute dependence on one another.

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

Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies. People spend their lives in or near the place where they were born, and they remain surrounded by relatives and childhood companions.

Within each country’s borders, different view exist of the obligations of individual citizens to one another, of provinces and cities to their neighbors, of the large and the small entities to the polity—corporations, churches, and other institutions—to society as a whole.

All the brothers shall stand together all shall be responsible for the action of each one.