Bernard Beckett Quotes

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.

Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.

A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.

Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members. What is this "something more?" Even to begin to answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short.

There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.

God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.

If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?

The Chinese people have only family and clan groups; there is no national spirit. Consequently, in spite of four hundred million people gathered together in one China, we are, in fact, but a sheet of loose sand.

We're all connected, related, part of one another's lives through the stories we tell ourselves and each other. For good and for bad.

We're all one thing, and we're all just enacting different aspects of ourselves all the time.

Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude - all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary.

I think that we're more united than the media would care to admit. We're not as divided as the perception would relay - not in the United States, not anywhere, really, in the world.

Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.

There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period.

The best moments any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel-cage of being me into the landscape of being us.

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

In this changing, complex and exciting world with exploding expectations, we need to find some common ground. We need people and ideas to turn to bind us, and Mahatma Gandhi with his message of oneness for mankind is one of them.

We often surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community. Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community.

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.

Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are. A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.

No self is of itself alone.

Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.

It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.

A community to be truly community, must have a quality of unselfconsciousness about it.