Clay Shirky Quotes

Facebook does social really well, but continues to fail at community.

People are murdering each other without any recourse... So we need to get in our communities and work from the inside out.

At Facebook we feel a lot of affinity not just for this community but for any community that is trying to do what Davos is trying to do, which is to share information. And Davos is doing it in a particular way - I think the Facebook approach is obviously more broad-based, we're trying to include everyone in the world. But the goal is the same: bring people together, to share information and make the world more connected, and have people have a deeper understanding of themselves, others, the communities of which they want to be a part and can be a part.

People, wherever they are, can make a community.

Let's start and build a House that works for the people, because this is the people's House.

Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.

You have a responsibility when you have a large community.

I really love connecting people, creating communities. As a kid, creation was something that I always loved.

Government should be a place where people can come together, and no one gets left behind. No one…gets left behind. An instrument of good.

Even when I lived in Chicago and I didn't have any family there, I would just go like I would be a guest and have dinner with a bunch of friends and do potluck or something. So I think that's it, just finding people that you love that love you and hang out with them.

Somehow, we have to get older people back close to growing children if we are to restore a sense of community, acquire knowledge of the past, and provide a sense of the future.

What I like best in Baltimore is the people, the neighborhoods and what goes on in the neighborhoods. Each has its own stories, own diners and own quirks. It's about community. I also like everything Old Bay.

I had parents who were attentive to what was going on politically. There was the Greek connection, a sense of a larger world. People coming in from abroad. There was a sense of community around ideas: a discourse and an adhesiveness which is my favorite word from [Walt] Whitman.

Here's what I learned as a mayor and a governor. The way you make communities safer and the way you make police safer is through community policing. You build the bonds between the community and the police force, build bonds of understanding, and then when people feel comfortable in their communities, that gap between the police and the communities they serve narrows. And when that gap narrows, it's safer for the communities and it's safer for the police.

Whenever I walk the street and see people ready to get with it, that's my reward.

If we don't rebuild that connection with people we will really find even bigger gaps, because our gap on inequality is not just economic.

We're not church planters. We are community planters and, as we work in our communities, we join local churches.

That is part of our critique of some of the charity and service work is that we can still keep relationships at a distance by creating programs that offer services but we don't really create a reconciled community.

If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior...you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.

The best education I received was working with people in the community on a grassroots basis. Because what it taught me was that ordinary people, when they are working together can do extraordinary things.

People don't talk to each other. You're alone with your television set or internet. But you can't have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call "secondary organizations," places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don't do it alone.

I feel that religion can be used as a tool to guide your life and help you connect with other people.

The fire in the bellies of the good people who work for a more fair and just world for all of us - that spark never fails to inspire me and warm my heart.

Sit around the bars, talked to people, ate in the restaurants, and chatted with the old ladies on the street. Fishermen are pretty much that way.

My own view - and I'm very open to hearing other perspectives - is that this movement-building needs to begin at home, in local communities. It isn't about trying to launch a brand new national party overnight. It's about people in communities coming together across lines of difference, bringing with them their movements, their families, and coming together and saying, "How can we together build a movement of movements here at home? What would that look like? What do we want to do right here in our communities?"