Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

We need a new kind of citizenship, so that we can see citizens as themselves earning the rank of patriot because of their involvement in their community affairs....We as a society need to be encouraging people to focus not just on individual wants but on serving the larger community.

We want to make nation-building a people's movement.

Unless we labor to help others achieve a reasonable stake in society, we may find ourselves losing the society in which we have too great a stake.

People should look at the government as 'us,' not as 'them' and not in terror.

I'd like people to be more aware of the benefits of communities. Lots of problems could be solved that way.

People who have no stake in society are the least likely to have respect for it.

Government is the people's business and every man, woman and child becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid.

Societies are healthiest when their radius of trust is broad and when people feel they can influence their own fate.

I want there to be a life for the street element. Instead of we always getting shut out. Instead of defenseless, having power.

The government is us; WE are the government, you and I."- Theodore Roosevelt

I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

Government can't completely take care of people by making a bunch of promises and programs. Organize your communities

It is not in violence and crime that our greatest danger lies. These evils are so perfectly apparent that they very quickly arouse the moral power of the people for their suppression. A far more serious danger lurks in the shirking of those responsibilities of citizenship, where the evil may not be so noticeable but is more insidious and likely to be more devastating.

For us going forward, it's to not reverse the dynamism of American society and the diversity. It's to pay attention to the people who are being ruined by it, and so this doesn't happen again.

The era of big government is over, but the era of big challenge is not. We need an era of big citizenship. There are many important people at this summit, but the most important title is 'citizen.' This is our republic. Let us keep it!

State control is important for the people who have always been excluded from the claims of social and economic development.

By obliging men to turn their attention to other affairs than their own, it rubs off that private selfishness which is the rust of society.

The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.

People, wherever they are, can make a community.

In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation and trivialization to feel engaged, connected, purposeful, ready to give, to engage, to care, to learn.

There are many strengths in modern society, but one of its weaknesses is the breakdown of many of the old structures and networks that supported people in times of crisis and need. Whenever we lose a strengthening element in society, we need to replace it with alternative systems as quickly as possible. Befriending schemes are a crucial part of this process, because they fill the gap that social erosion has left in the lives of so many vulnerable people.

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

Most of us think of government as them. Yet government isn't Them: It's us.

I know the biggest crime is just to throw up your hands, Say, This has nothing to do with me, I just want to live as comfortably as I can...

Man must have some recognized stake in society and affairs to knit him lovingly to his kind, or he is wont to revenge himself for wrongs real or imagined.