Russell Banks Quotes

I have a passion for libraries. They are potentially real community centers.

The times in my life I've felt the most alive is when I'm having a connection with people. We need to hack cities in a way to bring back that community culture.

I love the academy in terms of the life of the mind and the world of ideas. I also love the streets. I love the churches and mosques and synagogues. I love the trade union centers. I love the community centers. I speak regularly at prisons and so forth.

We lost the connection between the entertainment world and the neighborhoods.

North Carolina is an amazing place. It has the best food, and also has folks fighting really hard for what's right.

The arts can enrich all of us in this nation as individuals. The arts can enrich all of our communities and the country. And the arts can connect us to each other like nothing else can.

What I'd love more than anything is for Worldbuilders to continue to grow and become entangled in all the different corners of the geek community.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

I've worked with a lot of different Muslim groups around America. I've met with a lot of them, and I've heard how important it is for them to feel that they are wanted and included and part of our country, part of our homeland security, and that's what I want to see.

I hope people become inspired to become active in their community. That's the important thing.

Let's face it: The Jewish community is the most active political community in American society.

Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.

I don't close myself to the possibility of someplace outside the United States, but it would have to be someplace with an indigenous community, because that's where I feel at home.

Busy people tend to forgo the one activity - TV watching _ that is most lethal to community involvement

The dynamism of any diverse community depends not only on the diversity itself but on promoting a sense of belonging among those who formerly would have been considered and felt themselves outsiders.

Connecting to another is one of the most important things in the world and you can keep expanding that connection - one person, a family, a community, a country, a society, a culture.

I'm connected to the event of 9/11 by my desire to do something to honor the 9/11 survivors and those who didn't survive. Something that moves our society forward, something that engages children in what it means to be a citizen and encourages them to love and be inclusive. Because if we don't live our lives well - if I don't live my life well - it's an affront to all the people who were involved in the tragedy of 9/11.

Ultimately it's the public nature of those projects that I most enjoy. Museums are more than just places to view art, they're also civic and social centers.

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

If you don't have a well-thought out dream, you can start by figuring out where you want to go. If you cannot see yourself fairly or accurately represented in the community you live (from restaurants to department stores to clothing choices to conversations at the dinner table) and nothing there makes you feel awake or alive, I suggest you start doing some research on some other communities.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

When people come together around music, there's something ancient going on. It has to come from a genuine place and that's part of the challenge. You have to cultivate that authenticity everyday.

In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.

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

The Muslim contribution to the future of America is to not only speak out as Muslims, but to also speak out as citizens in the name of our common values. Our main contribution is to reconcile the American society with its own values, those that are not in contradiction to Islam. We have a duty of consistency.