“In a community, you are aware of belonging to a totality beyond yourself, one in which you have a stake. It’s made up of people you care about, whom in an emergency you will help care for, and who care about and will help care for you, to whom you are bonded by a recognizable common fate, with whom you are ‘in the same boat’ to some degree, pulling together through the choppy seas of life.
Communities that survive are made up of people who possess a capacity for cooperation, who are nourished by a sense of their interdependence as they struggle with the inevitable diversity and conflict that mark human aggregates. Communities are always in the process of becoming. They give a special meaning to one’s life, diminish one’s sense of vulnerability, of being adrift in an anonymous world. “
~ Suzanne Keller, Professor of Sociology, Princeton
quoted by Harold Mansur, Creating a Caring Community