Despair shows us the limit of our imagination. Imaginations shared create collaboration, collaboration creates community, and community inspires social change.
— Terry Tempest Williams
Attractive Imagined Communities quotations
In my wildest imagination, I never thought that the fifth of six children born to Helen and Buddy Watts - in a poor black neighborhood, in the poor rural community of Eufaula, Oklahoma - would someday be called Congressman.
For the first time in history, my community has had to use air conditioners.
Imagine that, air conditioners in the Arctic.
American civil rights leader, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Lynching is a murder. For the past four hundred years our people have been lynched physically, but now it's done politically. We're lynched politically, we're lynched economically, we're lynched socially, we're lynched in every way that you can imagine.
AIDS is a global problem and there should be a global solution found by the entire international community. It is really scary to see and imagine our world fall into pieces because we refuse to share and put in the common vestiges of our civilizations.
What it is is that there's an intrinsic value in creating something for the sake of creating it, and better than that ... there is this beauty in dropping it into a community of your own making, and seeing it dispersed, and seeing younger, more talented, just different talent, take it to levels you can never imagine, because that lives on.
The pupil's imagination is 'schooled' to accept service in place of value.
Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.
The future of every community lies in capturing the passion, imagination, and resources of its people.
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead.
The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.
If they (Muslim women) wish to cover their faces and isolate themselves from the rest of the community and so thoroughly reject our culture then I cannot imagine why they want to be here at all. Perhaps they should just push off back to their own countries.
Nobody knows why we're alive; so we all create stories based on our imagination of the world; and as a community, we believe in the same story. In India, every person believes his/ her own mythosphere to be real. Indian thought is obsessed with subjectivity; Greek thought with objectivity.
If with so little we have done so much in Brazil, imagine what could have been done on a global scale, if the fight against hunger and poverty were a real priority for the international community.
The mission of the media is to reflect the community to itself, to give the people a vision of who they are, what they're doing, what they want, what they need. I think motion pictures have been an incredible gift to humanity. I can't imagine living in a world without them.
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.
Imagine the consequences if Saddam fails to comply and we fail to act.
Saddam will be emboldened, believing the international community has lost its will. He will rebuild his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And some day, some way, I am certain, he will use that arsenal again, as he has ten times since 1983.
In order to survive, a plurality of true communities would require not egalitarianism and tolerance but knowledge, an understanding of the necessity of local differences, and respect. Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.
Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.
With everything that you can imagine at our fingertips, many of the social interactions that help tie people together in a community have faded away. Are communities traditionally built on relationships, trust and familiarity a thing of the past?
Travel can transform communities and lives around the world.
.. Imagine if we got to a place where people can go on holidays as their way of giving back.
I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.
If you're going to get up to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath you've got to figure out how you put people in possession of their heritage. To do that you have to talk about how they're being taught, and the imagination of community the people who are running our government have.
One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.
What inspires me most are people who imagine and implement solutions to challenges in their own lives, in their communities, in our country and around the world.
People who imagine and implement solutions to challenges in their own lives, in their communities, in our country and in our world have always inspired me.
Can you imagine what a different world we will live in when businesses do what's right for the communities and the environment in everything they do?
Imagine how difficult this issue would be if Iran had a nuclear weapon.
And so therefore it's up to the international community, including the United States, to work in concert to - for effective diplomacy.
Obama found a lot of people that think just like he does, and he put them in the intelligence community. Can you imagine? When you think of the intelligence community, don't you think of super patriots, don't you think of people out there even risking their lives to defend and protect the Constitution and the people of this country and this country itself as founded? No. That's not the kind of people Obama put at the CIA.
The arts are a green industry with a very high rate of return.
This is not money thrown away by any stretch of the imagination. This is money that creates jobs. This is money that brings life, financial life, to communities.
I think most people do not imagine how things can change.
In Detroit, there are community gardens that are only an indication that the country is coming back to the city. And that is something that actually is necessary to stop the real imminent danger of the extermination of our planet.
By stopping the flow of illegal immigration, we will save countless tax dollars, and that's so important because the tax - the dollars that we're losing are beyond anything that you can imagine. And the tax dollars that can be used to rebuild struggling American communities - including our inner cities.
Just imagine what would happen if Obama grew a pair and in his last year in office just said, "Forget it. Football is just too violent and too damaging to the economically vulnerable communities in this country. And it normalizes violence and fosters intolerance, etc." I mean: that would be awesome.
It's very difficult, I think for most writers, to carve out the time and the kind of imaginative space to do the writing that you really want to do and also to be an active, engaged, compassionate, giving human being in the world, to the people around you and to your broader community.
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.
Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.
South Korea is one of the worst countries when it comes to opportunity for women in social activities and employment. To my disgust, in certain communities in Korea, you cannot even imagine how severe sex discrimination is.