Communal Quotes

1. "He had already come to see human lives as one single communal life and it was perhaps this perception that gave him hope."
Author: Andreï Makine

2. "I'm the most communal person that exists and a very solitary person. So I think writing is a form of getting to the community and being alone, and it's the best of both possible worlds."
Author: Ariel Dorfman

3. "The greater the number of owners, the less the respect for common property. People are much more careful of their personal possessions than of those owned communally; they exercise care over common property only in so far as they are personally affected."
Author: Aristotle

4. "We are stronger as a group than an individual. Think in a cooperative and communal way, set up local food hubs and create growing communities."
Author: Arthur Potts Dawson

5. "Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn't be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn't be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; these are political views which most of us hold anyway."
Author: Arundhati Roy

6. "We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library"
Author: Carl Sagan

7. "Communal well-being is central to human life."
Author: Cat Stevens

8. "The reading rooms were large and quiet. Their windows were filmed in dust and desiccated insects, and seemed to age the light falling across the communal tables and the volumes in scores of languages."
Author: China Miéville

9. "I simply felt alone, one leaf sitting miles away from a giant, communal pile."
Author: Dan Wells

10. "I'd think it strange that the boardinghouse attracted both him and me, but that's what cheap places do -- draw in people with no money. An apartment of my own was unthinkable at that time of my life, and even if I'd found an affordable one it wouldn't have satisfied my fundamental need to live in a communal past, or what I imagined the past to be like: a world full of antiques."
Author: David Sedaris

11. "It is easy sometimes to blame genetics, some obesity gene perhaps. But even if this were true, we'll still be referring to the machine. Genetics are predispositions. The body is designed as a closed system, physiologically speaking and unless acted upon by an outside or higher force it maintains its functions. It is designed to sustain its own survival. The psychological (self-ordinate command) is essential for this survival because the body also belongs to a self, one that can overfeed it, starve it or kill it as may be. It is also by material urges that you seek to acquire wealth and by self command, suppose what you consider a higher more fulfilling purpose that you choose to give it all away.The hard core truth is that despite some obesity gene, you can starve yourself to death if you want, or perhaps if you feel you have an ulterior higher purpose like an anorexic might, to look thin and beautiful in the eyes of the communal."
Author: Dew Platt

12. "Worth as I use it here is immeasurable, not as in mathematics towards infinity. But that it can not be measured. There are no measurable parameters for it! Certainly not a material-communal measurable parameter for it! Such, it is what the being holds that cannot and should never be traded. When it is there, every essence of your being knows it, and takes commands from it that will be able to override any personal or imposed sense of value."
Author: Dew Platt

13. "During the crash and burn, I began to burn from cranial crown to flat sole, for meaning and understanding. Every concept, psychological perceptions with hardened pathways, everything that registered as inherited from the communal was starting to dissolve into meaninglessness. The foundational tenets, the pre-established belief systems, instilled sustenance systems tended by both family and extended communal began to dissolve, first as trivial, and then as untenable to my being without validation from me. If my life was worth anything, I choose to live the best life for me. So I entered what I call The Blank State."
Author: Dew Platt

14. "Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband."
Author: Elizabeth Bowen

15. "There is perhaps some hope to be derived from the fact that in most instances where an attempt to realize an ideal society gave birth to the ugliness and violence of a prolonged active mass movement the experiment was made on a vast scale and with a heterogeneous population. Such was the case in the rise of Christianity and Islam, and in the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions. The promising communal settlements in the small state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small Scandinavian states indicate perhaps that when the attempt to realize an ideal society is undertaken by a small nation with a more or less homogeneous population it can proceed and succeed in an atmosphere which is neither hectic nor coercive."
Author: Eric Hoffer

16. "If you're a boy, any display of sensitivity is gay. Compassion is gay. Crying is supergay. Reading is usually gay. Certain songs and types of music are gay. 'Enola Gay' would certainly be thought gay. Love songs are gay. Love itself is incredibly gay, as are any other heartfelt emotions. Singing is gay, but chanting is not gay. Wanking contests are not gay. Neither is all-male cuddling during specially designated periods in football matches, or communal bathing thereafter. (I didn't invent the rules of gay - I'm just telling you what they are.)"
Author: Gavin Extence

17. "Science is imagination in the service of the verifiable truth, and that service is indeed communal. It cannot be rigidly planned. Rather, it requires freedom and courage and the plural contributions of many different kinds of people who must maintain their individuality while giving to the group."
Author: Gerald Edelman

18. "Cobbled streets and no shops open past six o'clock, a communal life that seemed to revolve around church, and where you could often hear bird song and nothing else: Gaia felt as though she had fallen through a portal into a land lost in time."
Author: J.K. Rowling

19. "I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean.We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment."
Author: J.M. Coetzee

20. "Then you have this other phenomena of the paranormal romance. It's all the benefits of being a vampire without the sacrifices. By the gods, Meyer's vampires walk around sparkling in the daylight and some are vegetarians. But this phenomenon is also tied to a lot of our communal fears. Fear of aging. Fear of fading youth. Fear of loneliness. But whereas the classic motifs are more concerned with confronting and overcoming our fears, the fears of the paranormal romance genre become twisted fantasies of denial. The idea of staying young, attractive and powerful for eternity feeds into the modern self-absorbed ethos."
Author: Julie Ann Dawson

21. "The nation voted us to power to see unity and communal harmony, not for any division or communality."
Author: Khaleda Zia

22. "As they marched, the crowds lining the route broke into applause, a sweet and deeply felt spontaneous pattering that was a sort of communal embrace. Welcome home."
Author: Lance Morrow

23. "The only institution in the Sicilian conscience that really counts is the family; counts, that is to say, more as a dramatic juridical contract or bond than as a natural association based on affection. The family is the Sicilians' State. The State, as it is for us, is extraneous to them, merely a de facto entity based on force; an entity imposing taxes, military service, war, police. Within the family institution the Sicilian can cross the frontier of his own natural tragic solitude and fit into a communal life where relationships are governed by hair-splitting contractual ties. To ask him to cross the frontier between family and State would be too much. In imagination he may be carried away by the idea of the State and may even rise to being Prime Minister; but the precise and definite code of his rights and duties will remain within the family, whence the step towards victorious solitude is shorter."
Author: Leonardo Sciascia

24. "The political vision of the religious right is for the most part an individualistic politics of righteousness, not a communal politics of compassion."
Author: Marcus J. Borg

25. "Preparing the communal evening meal sometimes caused arguments. Every village in Sicily had a different recipe for squid and eels, disagreed on what herbs should be disbarred from the tomato sauce. And whether sausages should ever be baked."
Author: Mario Puzo

26. "On Wednesday, July 19, the Council, having gleaned and discerned, released its official verdict: the fall of the tile bearing the letter "Z" constitutes the terrestrial manifestation of an empyrean Nollopian desire, that desire most surely being that the letter "Z" should be utterly excised--fully extirpated--absolutively heave-ho'ed from our communal vocabulary!"
Author: Mark Dunn

27. "The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart."
Author: Marsha Norman

28. "Freedom, or individual liberty, was a basic premise of the Spanish anarchist tradition. "Individual sovereignty" is a prime tenet of most anarchist writing; the free development of one' s individual potential is one of the basic "rights" to which all humans are born. Yet Spanish anarchists were firmly rooted in the communalist-anarchist tradition. For them, freedom was fundamentally a social product: the fullest expression of individuality and of creativity can be achieved only in and through community. As Carmen Conde (a teacher who was also active in Mujeres Libres) wrote, describing the relationship of individuality and community: "I and my truth; I and my faith ... And I for you, but without ever ceasing to be me, so that you can always be you. Because I don' t exist without your existence, but my existence is also indispensable to yours."
Author: Martha A. Ackelsberg

29. "In the last camp they all ate grass, until the authorities forbade them to pull it up. They were accustomed to having the fruits of their little communal gardens stolen by the guards, after they had done all the work; but at the last camp everything was stolen."
Author: Martha Gellhorn

30. "New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment."
Author: Max Planck

31. "We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart."
Author: Max Stirner

32. "Between now and when we graduate next year there are at least ten weeks' holiday and five random public holidays.There's email and if you manage to get down to the town, there's text messaging and mobile phone calls. If not, the five minutes you get to speak to me on your communal phone is better than nothing. There are the chess nerds who want to invite you to our school for the chess comp next March and there's this town in the middle, planned by Walter Burley Griffin, where we can meet up and protest against our government's refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty."-Jonah Griggs"
Author: Melina Marchetta

33. "The Trinity is not a doctrinal innovation but constitutes an explanation of the God whom Christians experienced in proclamation, worship, fellowship, communal meals, and prayer. The doctrine of the Trinity is grounded in an experience—an experience of the Spirit of sonship and the Spirit of the Son."
Author: Michael F. Bird

34. "I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. ... All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps."
Author: Michael Ondaatje

35. "We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience."
Author: Michael Ondaatje

36. "... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds."
Author: Michael Ondaatje

37. "I ran the L.A. marathon and really loved the experience. Communal and wild and a gigantic challenge. Finishing that marathon means I can do more than I think. I think."
Author: Michael Weatherly

38. "The harmony of the human body is a prototype for personal and communal evolution."
Author: Nancy Mellon

39. "These shirts are perfectly serviceable." I rolled my eyes. "Serviceable? Anyan, I get it that you're utilitarian. If we were in the old country you'd write odes to factories. You'd sing the praises of the communal farm while you gnawed on a perfectly ‘serviceable' radish. But this is the new millennium. In America. Buy a button-up."
Author: Nicole Peeler

40. "Each of our 900 shows so far was different - maybe that's what makes the fans come back to our gigs time and again. And that they're always part of the show. Phish concerts are a communal experience."
Author: Page McConnell

41. "Both capitalism and Marxism promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures, and they declared that these, once established, would function by themselves; they declared that not only would they have no need of any prior individual morality, but that they would promote a communal morality. And this ideological promise has been proved false. The facts have clearly demonstrated it. The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful oppression of souls. And we can also see the same thing happening in the West, where the distance between rich and poor is growing constantly, and giving rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness."
Author: Pope Benedict XVI

42. "The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise."
Author: Raoul Vaneigem

43. "There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity."
Author: Robertson Davies

44. "The objective, according to Jesus, was not to get people inside of heaven, but to get heaven inside of people. An understanding of the gospel that concerns itself only with getting my own soul into heaven – damn this world, it's all going to burn anyway – falls miserably short of the revolutionary message of Jesus. Jesus did not come to live in your heart like an imaginary friend. He came to bring you into the kingdom that you might be a part of God's communal ministry of justice, grace, and mercy."
Author: Ronnie McBrayer

45. "And on a Canadian set, everybody is equal. You get paid the same. You live together in barracks. You have a communal kitchen. You buy and cook your own food."
Author: Sandra Oh

46. "Tobak Davenport, who is a cross between some Sugar Puffs and Lynn Faulds-Wood, was squatting there before being removed by the local constabulary after he went round to complain about Luther Blisset's pet turkey fouling the communal herb garden."
Author: St John Morris

47. "Stories are a communal currency of humanity."
Author: Tahir Shah

48. "For I firmly believe that Jewish life, indeed any communal life, can only be organized according to democratic principles."
Author: Theodore Bikel

49. "Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing, but a compromise- that which is common to you, me, and everybody."
Author: Thomas Hulme

50. "I never go back and listen to the recorded document. The thrill comes when the balance can be attained. Everyone in the room can have a shared, communal rock experience."
Author: Thurston Moore

Communal Quotes Pictures