Henry Ford Quotes

I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.

People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

Social solidarity must rest instead on the sole secure basis it can have: direct responsibility of people for one another. Such responsibility can be realized through the principle that every able-bodied adult holds a position within the caring economy - the part of the economy in which people care for one another - as well as within the production system.

The emphasis has been on rights, not responsibilities. When it comes to piecing together the fragments of broken lives, we have tended to place the entire burden on the state and its agencies.

All people owe their lives to surrounding society.

There is no such thing as society…There are individuals, men and women, and there are families.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a book called 'It Takes a Village.' And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, 'What the heck do you mean by that?' This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone.

America always pivots between collective responsibility and the idea that the individual can pull himself up by his bootstraps.

Team members have to hold each other accountable. If there's a meeting, all members have to commit to be present and to help one another; they can't just check out when they feel they're not getting any benefits.

The first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson no one learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of responsibility for you.

We in the West seem to have made a fetish out of complete individual self-sufficiency, of not needing help, of being completely private except in a very few selected relationships.

When one neighbor helps another, we strengthen our communities.

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

It is precisely because neither individuals nor small groups can be fully self-sufficient that cooperation is necessary to human survival and flourishing.

I'm part of a community that holds each other up, and it's been great to be held up too.

In any democratic, civilized - even non-democratic nations, if you are a nation, it means to say that in our case, if there's a hurricane in Louisiana, the people of Vermont are there for them. If there's a tornado in the Midwest, we are there for them. If there's flooding in the East Coast, the people in California are there for us.

I kind of grew up with a mix of two things. One was kind of this individual work ethic that my father and my stepfather and my mother all taught me, which was never depend on anyone else to do things for you, and work really hard on your own. At the same time, I benefited from the help of church and family and government my whole life.

The ethic of liberal individualism has so deeply permeated the psyches of blacks... of all classes that we have little support for a political ethic of communalism that promotes the sharing of resources.

I come from Nigeria, and we live by the idea that it takes a village. So my entire team. I live by my team: my friends, my neighbors, my teachers - they're the people who taught me how to be a free actor.

Vermont will take care of its own.

We too often prefer the individual thrill to collective responsibility.

It is time to break the bad habit of expecting something for nothing from our Government or from each other. Let us all take more responsibility not only for ourselves and our families but our communities and our country.

Society is held together by trust.

We forget that we all are the people; that while each of us in his group can shove off on the rest the bill of today, the debt is only postponed; the rest are passing it back to us. We have to pay in the end, every one of us.

Our wants are various, and nobody has been found able to acquire even the necessaries without the aid of other people, and there is scarcely any Nation that has not stood in need of others. The Almighty himself has made our race such that we should help one another. Should this mutual aid be checked within or without the Nation, it is contrary to Nature.