Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes

Communion is the law of growth, and homes only thrive when they sustain relations with each other.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

When one neighbor helps another, we strengthen our communities.

Your connections with other people are important, our connection to the earth.

Everything happens through relationships.

Our civic society is really all we have by way of nationhood.

He who is unconscious of the ties which connect him with every individual of his species feels no obligation to make sacrifices for their welfare or happiness.

It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members.

Society is held together by trust.

Those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand the one or the other.

All people owe their lives to surrounding society.

It really does matter what my neighbor’s lot in life is.

The complex affair we call the world requires a great variety of people to keep it going.

We must learn for the sake of one another to make better choices guided by more holistic measures of the common good we share.

I'm big on my community and want to stay that way.

Our lives are connected in ways we can't imagine. They're connected even before we know they're connected.

I don't think about it. I have always been linked up with everybody.

One person has a responsibility not just for himself but for inter-relationships with the existences of others and the world.

Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

However self-sufficient we may fancy ourselves, we exist only in relation - to our friend, family, and life partners; to those we teach and mentor; to our coworkers, neighbors, strangers; and even to forces we cannot fully conceive of, let alone define. In many ways, we are our relationships.

We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections.

We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself.

We live in community, and we're created in community. We're created out of the unity of two people, and then we're made into a family. It's just inherent in who we are.

But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people--first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy.

The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.