Religion as a whole specializes in sin management. It's all about organizing humanity in such a way that we cause as little damage as possible.
Tribal life comes automatically to an end when a primitive people begins to live in a town or a city, for sooner or later a tribal organization is found to be incompatible with life in a city.
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.
One of the first things that the First Nations are going to have to decide is, is it going to 640 communities, or is it, in fact, going to be some 50 to 60 nations.
Under the old philosophy which had governed the high Middle Ages things had been everywhere towards a condition of Society in which property was well distributed throughout the community, and thus the family rendered independent.
I think we need to have a nest of something which is family.
My title is intended to suggest that the community of scientists is organized in a way which resembles certain features of a body politic and works according to economic principles similar to those by which the production of material goods is regulated.
I grew up in a village after the war, and in the village, there were almost only women.
The community in which one hears the voice of God structures how one hears that voice and interprets what it says.
A community is like the ones who govern it.
Humans live best when each has his place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place and destroy the person.
A community is made up of intimate relationships among diversified types of individuals--a kinship group, a local group, a neighborhood, a village, a large family.
With gangs, there could be a positive outlook because it takes the older guys to come school these younger guys on the right roles.
Just as every animal is part of a kingdom, phylum, class, and order, every Dorchester resident has a parish, school, park, and neighborhood that they identify with.
Unlike the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth, the umma, or Muslim community, has no symbolic leader, let alone a formal one.
I had never understood why the farmlands of the U.S. had been settled in such a sparse and isolated way, whereas the farming communities in Europe seemed closer, more convivial, centered around village life.
There is an overarching comedy community, and then there are little comedy community pockets, almost like the way L.A. is structured. You have this grand scope of what Los Angeles is, but within that, there are all of these multi-functioning cities and neighborhoods.
Under weak government, in a wide, thinly populated country, in the struggle against the raw natural environment and with the freeplay of economic forces, unified social groups become the transmitters of culture.
A society is a group whose members have more relationships with one another then they do with outsiders.
Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.
Evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or hermit.
Law and order in our communities doesn't arise spontaneously.
Coming out of university, one of my obsessions was that in the novels I was reading, they seemed to be portraying a world that had a social fabric. People knew each other in 'War and Peace.' They went to all the same balls. These were societies with tightly wound, woven, social textures.
Tiredness sets a natural limit to what a human being is prepared to walk daily, and this limit has taught man all through history the size of rural or urban communities.
Society is the union of men and not the men themselves.
