Lack of Community Quotes

When I was in Paris I was at a big club in a major city, but nobody really cared about each other. It didn't have that family feeling, I didn't see any team spirit.

There's no "brothers" when it comes to white people. We are just complete individuals. We don't care about each other. He's not my brother; my brother lives in Ohio - I don't know that guy.

It's very strange to go to cities like London and New York. People walk so quickly, they seem to be in a hurry all the time. And you don't say 'Hi' to everyone you meet, and you don't smile to everyone you meet, because there's just so many. Which is also very strange.

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well.

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

in the big city nobody has time to make friends. The big city is a big solitude.

If we keep asking the wrong questions, we are just going to get better wrong answers. The solution to lack of community isn't to give up on the community.

There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world.

The object in America is to avoid contact, to treat all as foes unless they're known to be friends. Here you have a million crabs living in a million crevices. ... But the garden's greatest benefit, I feel, as not relief to the eyes, but to make the eyes sees our neighbors.

I come from what they call the land of nowhere. I'm from the suburb. It's extremely atomizing.

Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.

I think London is a bit sad, and I find it a bit overwhelming. There's a lot of quite unhappy people, and it's very goal-driven.

I myself lived in London for 20 years, and I never knew my next-door neighbors. I never knew what they did. I never knew their names. They didn't know what I did for a living, and they didn't know my name.

As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. ... Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl.

The most general deficiency in our sort of culture and education is gradually dawning on me: no one learns, no one strives towards, no one teaches--enduring loneliness.

The Left, in a general sense, is very much atomized. We live in highly atomized societies. People are pretty much alone; it's you and your iPad.

New York was not a romantic city at [80th]. Nobody knows who you are and you don't have to care about anybody else. It's a very cold city, I should say.

There are several factors in modern society that contribute to loneliness. One is that we are more mobile than we have been in decades past, which is fantastic in many respects, but also leads to us to move away from communities that we grew up with and got to know over time.

I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity.

We are a culture that relies on technology over community, a society in which spoken and written words are cheap, easy to come by, and excessive. Our culture says anything goes; fear of God is almost unheard of. We are slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry.

There's no such thing as society.

Life for women in rural Scotland is not like anywhere else in the world. We all live very far apart, and you don't just ring your girlfriend up for a cup of coffee. There really is no sense of community, no pubs, no clubs. The golf clubs are male prerogatives, and the women are isolated and have to have their own resources.

In L.A., you really are in your car all day alone, and there's very little public life.