Civic Life Quotes

“The city was following a routine of stirring every morning, teeming with people devoured by politics and people consuming politics, people shouldering responsibility and people escaping from responsibility, people raising their heads with honesty and people shouting loudly to hide their dishonesty; and by evening, it was sinking into slumber, exhausted and weary from its own chaos. I walked for the first time on the dust of this city and lived with its pulse, its identity woven into mine.

Flawed or fading, whatever it was, it was mine. I took the city and answered: ‘This City is Mine.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Alexis de Tocqueville admired the laws that formally established America's democratic order, but he argued that voluntary organizations were the real source of the nation's robust civic life. John Dewey claimed that social connection is predicated on "the vitality and depth of close and direct intercourse and attachment." "Democracy begins at home," he famously wrote, "and its home is the neighborly community.”
― Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

“Civility is the everyday ethic of honoring the dignity of others as we would wish our own to be honored—an active commitment to justice, respect, and mutual responsibility in shared civic life.”
― Diane Kalen-Sukra