The best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class.

About Aristotle

Portrait of Aristotle

Aristotle (Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, romanized: Aristotélēs; 384–322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings span the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, and the arts. As the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy in the Lyceum in Athens, he began the wider Aristotelian tradition that...

More quotations from Aristotle

When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.

One swallow does not make a summer.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet and they are growing.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way... you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.

More quotations tagged with “community”

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.

—Margaret Mead

isolation community

One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals. When we pool our strength and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress.

strength helping community welcome distress

To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.

socialization community domination

For the Dargara people, death results in simply a different form of belonging to the community. It is a lesson . . . that change is the norm, that the world is defined by eternal cycles of decline and regeneration. . . . Death is not a separation but a different form of communion, a higher form of connectedness . . . providing an opportunity for even greater service.

—Malidoma Somé

death connection community belonging regeneration reincarnation communion

As one reads history . . . one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

history crime cruelty punishment community