Community Roots Quotes

I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organized masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race.

I have a deep tribal sense. I grew up in a synagogue that my ancestors built. I sat in the third row. My family was decent. They were good people; they were handshake people. So I never had a sense of rebellion.

I still have a book club with my friends from when I was 5. That's the privilege of growing up in a place where people want to remain. It's a huge gift.

A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.

I grew up in southwestern Ontario in the heart of a Mennonite community. All my family are part of the Mennonite church.

When people ask where I studied to be an ambassador, I say my neighborhood and my school. I've tried to tell my kids that you don't wait until you're in high school or college to start dealing with problems of people being different. The younger you start, the better.

Hip-hop originated from the Bronx specifically; that means everything. I'm down the block from where hip-hop was born and raised, so I'm glad I am here and I'm able to represent New York the way I am.

I grew up around so many different people in so many different neighborhoods, but the Latino heritage, the neighborhoods, and people have always been a part of my life, ever since I was a kid.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

Out of the homes of America will come the future citizens of America, and only as those homes are what they should be will this nation be what it should be.

Even though I have a nice house, nice family, the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins, my brothers, my sisters, they don't wanna move out. They don't want to and they don't have the means to sustain it. That's where my heart is and that's what I think about all the time.

old folks is the nation.

I grew up in a small, rural community, where my extended family were mountain-folk type people, and some were very religious.

I come from south Wales. A place called Aberbargoed.

My parents didn't really understand too much about sport. At that time, we were in a Polish community in the inner city of Chicago, and I was the youngest of a bunch of cousins. Polish families are real big, with cousins and aunts and uncles.

It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto anymore, but every time I go back, I'm still seeing the same things that I lived.

Europe is, perhaps, the least worn-out of the continents, because it is the most lived in. A place that is lived in lives.

No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate, they know that this is the place that we were born and raised.

It was my dream to have a beauty parlour in our village and to live near my family in Sinjar.

Presidents come from the people and the should return to the people.

Rap is supposed to be about keeping it real and not relinquishing your roots in the community. Without that, it's just posturing. Somebody who claims to speak for the 'hood don't need no private jet.

Home is the seminary of all other institutions. There are the roots of all public prosperity, the foundations of the State, the germs of the church. There is all that in the child makes the future man; all that in the man makes the good citizen.

If you've been here 15 years and you've got three kids and grandkids and you've been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don't think we're going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out.