#community

We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift. ↗

— Al Gore

#change #collaboration #community #policy #shift

To be a librarian is not to be neutral, or passive, or waiting for a question. It is to be a radical positive change agent within your community. ↗

— R. David Lankes

#community #librarians #libraries #change

Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is not profitable. Stagnation is not a medical term. The 17.5 million Americans diagnosed as suffering a major depression in 1997 were mostly damned. (Psychobiological examinations confuse cause and symptom.) Deficient serotonergic functioning, ventral prefrontal cerebral cortex, dis-inhibition of impulsive-aggressive behavior, blah blah blah: the medical lexicon boils emotion from human being. Go take a drug, the doctor says. Pain is a biochemical phenomenon. Erase all memory. ↗

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

#biochemical-phenomenon #cause-and-symptom #disinhibition #doctors #drugs

Social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communication. ↗

— Robert D. Putnam

#computers #internet #technology #communication

A free theologian works in communication with other theologians...He waits for them and asks them to wait for him. Our sadly lacking yet indispensable theological co-operation depends directly or indirectly on whether or not we are wiling to wait for one another, perhaps lamenting, yet smiling with tears in our eyes. ↗

— Karl Barth

#theology #communication

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#community #competition #giftedness #modern #printing-press

Having a pleasant time can extend a long period of time to have a fun time. ↗

— Travis Polso

#communication #community #economy #extend #fun

We are social beings who make communities with an urgency, and it is a stern charge to make us take refuge in the lonely world of oneself. ...Racism attempts to occlude our cosmopolitanism (of the songs in and out of our bones), and it often appropriates our mild forms of xenophobia into its own virulent project. Difference among peoples is something that we negotiate in our everyday interactions, asking questions and being better informed of our mutual realities. To transform difference into the body is an act of bad faith, a denial of our shared nakedness. ↗

— Vijay Prashad

#difference #faith

When I walked into the Christian section of a bookstore, the message was clear: Faith is something you do alone. Rick does not have much tolerance for people living alone. He’s like Bill Clinton in that he feels everyone’s pain. If Rick thinks somebody is lonely, he can’t sleep at night. He wants us all to live with each other and play nice so he can get some rest. Tortured soul. ↗

— Donald Miller

#community #donald-miller #peace #faith

Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins. ↗

— V. S. Naipaul

#always #ant #begins #community #crisis