I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible.
- Gandhi
It is our collective and individual responsibility to protect and
nurture the global family, to support its weaker members and to preserve and
tend to the environment in which we all live.
- The Dalai Lama
The
world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures
are not failed attempts at being you: they are unique manifestations of the
human spirit.
- Wade Davis
I am a part of
all that I have met.
- Alfred Tennyson
This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century --
solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in
despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning
to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own
identity but by that of others.
- Elie Wiesel
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as
I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
- George Bernard Shaw
The American city should be a collection of communities where every member
has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his
streets and in the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual's
dignity and self-respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his
neighbors. It should be a place where each of us can find the satisfaction
and warmth which comes from being a member of the community of man. This is
what man sought at the dawn of civilization. It is what we seek today.
- Lyndon B. Johnson
There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without
vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.
- M. Scott Peck
A Senegalese poet said 'In the end we will conserve only what we love.
We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.'
We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love,
and in order to preserve our common world heritage.
-
Yo Yo Ma
Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead
In every community there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds
to heal. In every heart there is the power to do it.
- Marianne Williamson
If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which
to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your
purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning.
This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge,
the joy of growth.
- Mitsugi Saotome
We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been - a place half-remembered
and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community.
Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having
the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive
us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever
we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength
to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle
of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.
- Starhawk
A first
grader should understand that her or his culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are
thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures
function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives
to our own society...Cultural relativity is defensible, attractive. It’s
a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we
don’t like it.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Communication leads to
community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
- Rollo May
The key
to community is the acceptance, in fact the celebration of our individual
and cultural differences. It is also the key to world peace.
- M. Scott
Peck
Every view
of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes
a possibility of life.
- Octavio Paz
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the
artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
- John F. Kennedy
People can only live fully by helping others to live. When you give
life to friends you truly live. Cultures can only realize their further richness
by honoring other traditions. And only by respecting natural life can humanity
continue to exist.
- Daisaku
Ikeda
Embracing diversity is one adventure after another, opening new paths of discovery
that connect an understanding to caring, listening, and sharing with others
who are different than ourselves.
- April Holland
If
you talk to [someone] in a language [he or she] understands, that goes to
[the person's] head. If you talk to [somebody] in [his or her] language,
that goes to [the] heart.
- Nelson Mandela
Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world.
-
Rumi
Being exposed to the existence of other
languages increases the perception that the world is populated by people
who not only speak differently
from oneself but whose cultures and philosophies are other than one's own.
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry but by demonstrating that all people
cry, laugh, eat, worry and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try to
understand each other, we may even become friends.
- Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us
talks, listens, and thinks in his/her own special language that has been shaped
by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes.
The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is
pretty remote.
- Anonymous
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and
for language.
- Gaston Bachelard
For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.
- Ingrid Bengis
Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
- Orson Rega Card
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
- Charlemagne
Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come
from and where they are going.
- Rita Mae Brown
Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
- Sir Winston Churchill
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies
of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
- George Eliot
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away,
a new succession takes their place.
- John French
Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which
they grow.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees
of nations.
- Samuel Johnson
Language is the inventory of human experience.
- L. W. Lockhart
Americans who travel abroad
for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress
that has been made in the last 30 years, many
foreign people still speak in foreign
languages.
- Dave Barry
I have been a believer
in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some
words got me into trouble and others got me out.
- Katherine Dunn
Language is wine upon the
lips.
- Virginia Woolf
There are hundreds of languages in the world, but a smile speaks them all.
- Anonymous
The limits of my language
mean the limits of my world.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical
results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever
speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them
anything!
- Maria Montessori
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the
measure of our lives.
- Toni Morrison
Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
- Benjamin Lee Whorf
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different
world.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
We may have different religions, different languages, different colored
skin, but we all belong to one human race.
- Kofi Annan
We cannot be divided either by the languages we speak, by the faiths
we profess or by the political views we choose.
- Viktor Yushchenko
Man does
not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
- Roland Barthes
At present, roughly 5,1000 languages are spoken around the globe.... Yet many
indicators suggest that within a generation or two, not more than 100 of
these languages will survive. Languages are dying out every bit as quickly
as species. While in the latter case, plants and animals disappear from the
history of nature never to be seen again, with the demise of languages, entire
cultures are vanishing from the history of civilization never to be lived
again.
- Wolfgang Sachs