cooperative society Quotes

A society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. Trust lubricates social life. Networks of civic engagement also facilitate coordination and communication and amplify information about the trustworthiness of other individuals.

Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.

There was an idea in the air, becoming clearer and stronger, an idea not just in the theories of Karl Marx but in the dreams of writers and artists through the ages: that people might cooperatively use the treasures of the earth to make life better for everyone, not just a few.

We must live in groups; other people are like nutrients for us, and are absolutely essential for our survival.

The ballot can give our civilization its crowning glory—the Cooperative Commonwealth.

We have no parties standing in opposition to each other, just as we have no class of capitalists and a class of workers exploited by capitalists in opposition to each other.

At the heart of my politics has always been the value of community, the belief that we are not merely individuals struggling in isolation from each other, but members of a community who depend on each other, who benefit from each other's help, who owe obligations to each other. From that everything stems: solidarity, social justice, equality, freedom.

There is but one mode by which man can possess in perpetuity all the happiness which his nature is capable of enjoying, - that is by the union and co-operation of all for the benefit of each.

I think the American Dream should be about a greater progressive legislation that allows for what I call a necessary future world of cooperational humanism.

Each individual member of a co-operative society works with that interest which is inseparable from the new position he enjoys. Each has an interest in the other.

I hear a lot of cries of socialism and certainly real disguises of "Why should I share my money with these people?" We have to get back to "we." It's important to get back to "we" not just "I."

The two great movements of our century -- towards Liberty of the individual and social co-operation of the whole community -- are summed up in Anarchist-Communism.

I can't think of a community that couldn't benefit from communal thinking.

The cultivation of sensibility on purely personal lines may, in fact, be the very worst training for a world where only the corporate and the cooperative will matter.

The motivating force of the theory of a Democratic way of life is still a belief that as individuals we live cooperatively, and, to the best of our ability, serve the community in which we live.

Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.

In a society where every man works for himself, individual incentive, working for one's self. If people worked for one's self, there wouldn't be the electric light, there wouldn't be engines and powered vehicles, there wouldn't be electrification and reservoirs and water purification. These are processes that help all people. And processes that help single people is a very primitive value system carried into this century, which is really not necessary.

I am a friend to subordination, as most conducive to the happiness of society. There is a reciprocal pleasure in governing and being governed.

Nowadays, to say that we are clever animals is not to say something philosophical and pessimistic but something political and hopeful - namely, if we can work together, we can make ourselves into whatever we are clever and courageous enough to imagine ourselves becoming. This is to set aside Kant's question "What is man?" and to substitute the question "What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?

As society is only possible if everyone, while living his own life, at the same time helps others to live; if every individual is simultaneously means and end; if each individual's well-being is simultaneously the condition necessary to the well-being of others, it is evident that the contrast between I and thou, means and end, automatically is overcome.