Social Belonging Quotes

No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.

I marvel again at the nakedness of men's lives: the showers right out in the open, the body exposed for inspection and comparison, the public display of privates. What is it for? What purposes of reassurance does it serve? The flashing of a badge, look, everyone, all is in order, I belong here. Why don't women have to prove to one another that they are women? Some form of unbuttoning, some split-crotch routine, just as casual. A doglike sniffing.

Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose … Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom.

Am I not turtley enough for the Turtle Club? Turtle! Turtle!

I'm not a Johnny-come-lately Jew. I've been around. I watch out for the Jews; I watch out for the Catholics.

I was always kind of searching for the right social group in high school and never really felt like I belonged with any one specific clique.

I'm so connected to the community that I was lucky enough to be born into.

I love visiting my friends because it makes me feel normal.

I hope through The L Word to become an honorary member of the gay tribe. I cherish the thought that some young girl or woman somewhere may one night turn on the television and for the first time ever see her life represented - not as an isolated incident but as a multiplicity. Her overwhelming fear may have been that she might never find her tribe, she might never find love and now she knows that they are both out there waiting for her.

A community belongs to those who take ownership of it.

I think a lot of people, when they don't quite fit in in the world, use humor to combat that and to find their place in society.

We like to be apart of something that's about to grow into something huge.

By virtue of my traditions, and my community, I worked hard to ensure that I was accepted as part of the traditional family of America.

I used to act in plays when I was in school and college, but you cannot say that I was passionate about acting. I was only interested in being a part of the group, and the group was passionate about filmmaking.

Sometimes in Asian homes it is all about where we've come from, which is important too, but it is about where you live and where you're born and the people who are the same as you.

Kids want acceptance from their peers, but in two different, opposing ways: They want to be like everyone else and they want to be different from everyone else. So the question is: How do you reconcile these opposing longings?

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

Just as every animal is part of a kingdom, phylum, class, and order, every Dorchester resident has a parish, school, park, and neighborhood that they identify with.

In the 50s and early 60s, community was incredibly important to people.

But if you aren't any religion, how are you going to know if you should join the Y or the Jewish Community Center?

When at the CIA, I was fond of saying that many jihadis join the movement for the same reasons that young Americans join the Crips and the Bloods: youthful alienation, the need to belong to something greater than self, the search for meaningful identity. But it also matters what gang you join.

Do you think that it is possible to have a mere taste of commonness? Either one hates it or makes common cause with it.

I am genuinely into soul, R&B and hip hop - all these genres that get slapped under the 'soul' genre. That spoke to me more than it did to my punk-rock friends. And punk spoke more to me than it did to my soul friends. I basically didn't fit comfortably in either world.

I don't want San Francisco to be just a place where people just move for opportunities.

I don't really understand it even now, It does have an angle which is attached to something quite primal in girls. I guess people want it to define them, like 'I'm a Twilight fan.' That's crazy to me. I think people really just like being part of a crowd. There's something just tremendously exciting about hyping yourself up to that level.