Collective Identity Quotes

The cheapest form of pride however is national pride. For it reveals in the one thus afflicted the lack of individual qualities of which he could be proud, while he would not otherwise reach for what he shares with so many millions. He who possesses significant personal merits will rather recognize the defects of his own nation, as he has them constantly before his eyes, most clearly. But that poor blighter who has nothing in the world of which he can be proud, latches onto the last means of being proud, the nation to which he belongs to. Thus he recovers and is now in gratitude ready to defend with hands and feet all errors and follies which are its own.

There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.

A country, after all, is not something you build as the pharaohs built the pyramids, and then leave standing there to defy eternity. A country is something that is built every day out of certain basic shared values.

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.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent community and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today we cannot count on any such inheritance.

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

And we call ourselves the human race.

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

A person is a person through other persons; you can't be human in isolation; you are human only in relationships.

Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge - a common understanding - likemindedness as the sociologists say.

We can be human only together. A person is a person to other persons.

Believers are never told to become one; we already are one and are expected to act like it.

What unites us, is much greater than what divides us.

We are all Americans, sir.

Pop culture is the scaffold we all carry around with us.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbors.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

People who get together, regardless of other structures, will find something in common. They are bound to. That was the Pete Seeger let's-all-sing theory.

E Pluribus Unum, the Latin phrase on the great seal of the United States literally translated means one from many. We need to reattach pluribus to unum—the many to the one.

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.

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

I hope we, the American people, can come to the understanding that we are not each other's enemies. The enemies are those who are stoking the flames of division, trying to divide us into every category.

We were not fathers also to convey the promise, as Abraham was; nor although the promise, as collectively taken, had belonged to us, as to Abraham it did.

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

After I arrived in the United States, I realized that in the army, Israelis learn how to be part of something bigger than themselves.