Rowan Williams Quotes

The Chinese began with the assumption that the group is the fundamental unit of reality. Individuals? Sure, we can factor them out from their groups, but let us not think that they as individuals have any viability apart from their group.

For traditional societies … the collective, the group, is more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.

Americans are so individualistic, they do not realize their individualism is a communally derived value.

Some speak of the public as if it were someone with whom they have had dinner at the Leipzig Fair in the Hotel de Saxe. Who is this public? The public is not a thing, but rather an idea, a postulate, like the Church.

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

I don't really know what 'community' means. And I never use that word.

Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds.

Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask.

The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.'

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

A society is not a market. It is a political community.

Society is the union of men and not the men themselves.

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

What the people believe is true.

What manner of thing this 'public opinion' is, should be best known to those who have its name forever in their mouths and erect the regard for it into a positive article of religion. Its self-styled organ in our times is the 'Press.'

What I've discovered is that from football fans to undertakers, secret agents to marble-players and politicians, we all are part of at least one tribe. By tribes, I'm talking anthropologically; these groups are determined less by genes and more by the work they do or the passions they pursue.

You know, as far as public perception goes, if you get seen with some people one time, everyone thinks you're in that group.

It's not just human nature to associate in tribes. It's deeper than that.

Forming communities - even and especially ones based on strong loyalties and allegiances - is in our DNA. It's what's kept us alive for millions of years.

Any group of persons – prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients – develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it.