Commonwealth Quotes

“In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy.
In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers...
Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed?
The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
― Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome

“A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.
(pg. 63, "Racism and the Economy")”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Some legislators only wish to vengeance against a particular enemy. Others only look out for themselves. They devote very little time on the consideration of any public issue. They think that no harm will come from their neglect. They act as if it is always the business of somebody else to look after this or that. When this selfish notion is entertained by all, the commonwealth slowly begins to decay. ”
― Thucydides

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.”
― Winston Churchill, Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches

“Who said the British empire was gone?! When I travel around the world and see and hear the English language everywhere, I know that the empire on which the sun never sets, is still alive. It never died. It continued to exist, but in a different shape, its language, English, which has become the global language.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“The intellectual is and only can be a militant, engaged as a singularity among others, embarked on the project of co-research aimed at making the multitude. The intellectual is thus not 'out in front' to determine the movements of history or 'on the sidelines' to critique them but rather completely 'inside.”
― Michael Hardt, Commonwealth

“Everyone is by absolute natural right the master of his own thoughts, and thus utter failure will attend any attempt in a commonwealth to force men to speak only as prescribed by the sovereign despite their different and opposing opinions.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise

“All life is linked together in such a way that no part of the chain is unimportant. Frequently, upon the action of some of these minute beings depends the material success or failure of a great commonwealth.”
― John Henry Comstock

“The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.”
― Wendell Berry

“Let's call this then, only half facetiously, a new patristic, in which the intellectual is charged with the task not only to denounce error and unmask illusions, and not only to incarnate the mechanisms of new practices of knowledge, but also, together with others in a process of co-research, to produce a new truth. -- Commonwealth, 118”
― Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

“plots, true or false, are necessary things, to raise up commonwealths and ruin kings.”
― Joe Poyer, The Chinese Agenda

“Los buenos actos resuenan a nuestro paso, mucho tiempo después de que hayamos olvidado haberlos realizado.”
― Sena Jeter Naslund, Abundance

“The QSMV Dominion Monarch was launched in 1938 to be a luxury passenger liner. Designed with refrigerated cargo holds, she was built to connect Great Britain with other Commonwealth countries. At that time, “The Sun Never Set on the British Empire!” When World War II erupted, the Dominion Monarch was commandeered by the Crown, painted grey and served as a British Troop Ship for the duration of the war. After the war she was the ship that carried Adeline and her daughters back to South Africa. The Dominion Monarch was released from Government service on July 21, 1947 and was restored to being the magnificent ocean liner she was intended to be. The ship later served as a floating hotel for the Century Exposition in Seattle, Washington, before going to the breakers in Japan, on November 25, 1962….”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Suppresed I Rise"

“Unlike Penn and those who stood to profit from the acquisition of land, Lenape sachems sought trade goods and payments for their lands in order to distribute the wealth to their communities. Penn, an eyewitness and careful observer of Lenape sachems, noted that 'wealth circulates like blood, all parts partake.”
― Dawn G. Marsh, A Lenape among the Quakers: The Life of Hannah Freeman

“Faith communities will remember Queen Elizabeth, for their warm relationship with her, with a particular commitment to interfaith dialogue and harmony.”
― Qamar Rafiq