Tom Peters Quotes

There may have been a time when preservation was about saving an old building here and there, but those days are gone. Preservation is in the business of saving communities and the values they embody.

Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people.... We are a nation rich in rivers.

What thoughts are to the individual, art is to the community as a whole. That's where you reflect on who you are, who you hope to be, what you've gone through, and where you hope to go.

Movies can tell us about our place, or lack of place, in our culture.

In order to know a community, one must observe the styles of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most ceremony.

The quickest way to learn about a new place is to know what it dreams of.

The [Kwanzaa] holiday, then will of necessity, be engaged as an ancient and living cultural tradition which reflects the best of African thought and practice in its reaffirmation of the dignity of the human person in community and culture, the well-being of family and community, the integrity of the environment and our kinship with it, and the rich resource and meaning of a people's culture.

Soccer isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions.

You can't be from Montgomery, Alabama, and not have a background in the church. It's at the core of who we are as a people.

Culture has always been more important than politics. Sometimes culture is a mirror that reflects what is; sometimes it's a search-light pointing the way to what will be.

For people, 'here' signifies not merely a physical space, but also an historical space.

Young people are at risk of being disinherited from their community if that community lacks the courage and confidence to teach its history.

We live in what virtually amounts to a museum - which does not happen to a lot of people.

In our own case, we don't consider the loss of a monastery or a monument the end of our entire way of life. If one monastery is destroyed, sometimes it happens.

I cannot let a place that is so important to so many people fade away. Something that is wonder and comfort and mystery all together that they have nowhere else. If you had that, wouldn't you want to keep it?

Racial and denominational schools impart to the membership of their communities something which the general educational institution is wholly unable to inculcate.

Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.

The family is a creation of God. The way to strengthen the nation is to strengthen the homes of the people.

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.

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.

Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.

I'm on the record as saying things like I think it's important for people to understand their Bible stories, not because I'm an advocate of religion - clearly, I'm not - but once again, what comes from the Bible has formed such an important part of our culture.

In a day of footloose movements of people and of mixed marriages in the ancestry of the most desirable elements of the community we preach unabashed the gospel of the pure race.

If I go all the way politicized, I become a zealot who's not allowed to have fun with the people and the community that raised me. But if I go the other way, I become an ignoramus who isn't properly qualified to speak on my community's behalf.