"You are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not government’s responsibility. It is not your school’s or your social club’s or your church’s or your neighbor’s or your fellow citizen’s. It is yours, utterly and singularly yours."  --August Wilson

"We must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood [and sisterhood]."  —Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Working in conflict mediation for years, I heard it often: two groups in conflict would be brought together, and someone would say something like, “Well, we all know why we’re here” — and immediately the fracture would deepen, because some people were there because of something that happened last week, whereas others were there because of something systemic. 

Or somebody, in an attempt to create common ground, would say “All our lives have been impacted by this conflict.” As a mediator, I could see some people checking out of the process, because the “our” wasn’t brave enough in that sentence. Many rooms are filled with hurting people, yes, but hurting people whose hurt has been disproportionate to each other. Acknowledging that won’t break us, it might even make us. 

--Pádraig Ó Tuama

"Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master, --David Foster Wallace

“You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness … has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.”  --David Foster Wallace

 Nothing is sweet or easy about community. Community is a fellowship of people who do not hide their joys and sorrows but make them visible to each other as a gesture of hope.

In community we say: “Life is full of gains and losses, joys and sorrows, ups and downs—but we do not have to live it alone. We want to drink our cup together and thus celebrate the truth that the wounds of our individual lives, which seem intolerable when lived alone, become sources of healing when we live them as part of a fellowship of mutual care.”

Community is like a large mosaic. Each little piece seems so insignificant. One piece is bright red, another cold blue or dull green, another warm purple, another sharp yellow, another shining gold. Some look precious, others ordinary. Some look valuable, others worthless. Some look gaudy, others delicate. We can do little with them as individual stones except compare them and judge their beauty and value. When, however, all these little stones are brought together in one big mosaic, portraying the face of Christ, who would ever question the importance of any one of them? If one of them, even the least spectacular one, is missing, the face is incomplete. Together in the one mosaic, each little stone is indispensable and makes a unique contribution to the glory of God. That’s community, a fellowship of little people who together make God visible in the world.

--Henri Nouwen

"Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."  --Paulo Freire