Communities - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

As men grow more civilized, and the subdivision of occupations and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support; and that it did not in your day constituted the essential cruelty and unreason of your system.

- Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)

''We'' is from God, and ''I'' from the devil.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

We are not alone. No one ever is alone. Not since the first faint stirring of the first flicker of life, on the first planet in the galaxy that knew the quickening of sentiency, has there ever been a single entity that walked or crawled or slithered down the path of life alone.

- Clifford D. Simak, Time and Again (1950)

Man needs freedom, but few men are so strong as to be happy with complete freedom. A man needs to be part of a group, with accepted and respected 64 Communities relationships. Some men join foreign legions for adventure; still more swear on a bit of paper in order to acquire a framework of duties and obligations, customs and taboos, a time to work and a time to loaf, a comrade to dispute with and a sergeant to hate - in short, to belong.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Between Planets (1951)

A man is morally responsible to his community. That's a good idea. But his community is also morally responsible to him.

- Philip K. Dick, The ManWho Japed (1956)

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

- Aldous Huxley, Brave NewWorld Revisited (1958)

No man is an island, but I have met many isthmuses and a few peninsulas.

- Susanna Jacobson, ''Notes from Magdalen More'' (1973)

We spread among the community and we became a part of them, sharing in their consciousness and directing them in their total integration. [. . .] They had integrated their group personality on a level that we could perceive and understand. This is the natural evolution of men and truly their one salvation in the total hostile universe. - Thomas N. Scortia, ''The Armageddon Tapes

- Tape 1'' (1974)

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.

- Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

Lev felt the strength of his friends and the whole community, supporting and upholding. It was as if he were not Lev alone, but Lev times a thousand - himself, but himself immensely increased, enlarged, a boundless self mingled with all the other selves, set free, as no man alone could ever be free.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The Eye of the Heron'' (1978)

''If human beings are all monsters, why should I sacrifice anything for them?'' ''Because they are beautiful monsters,'' he whispered. ''And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest 65 Communities hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty.''

- Orson Scott Card, Wyrms (1987)

I'm not good in groups . . . It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent.

- Richard Danus, ''Deja Q,'' episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1990)

These are the people who hold a community together, who lead. Unlike the sheep and the wolves, they perform a better role than the script given them by their inner fears and desires. They act out the script of decency, of selfsacrifice, of public honor - of civilization. And in the pretense, it becomes reality.

- Orson Scott Card, Xenocide (1991)

Even after two separate years of enforced togetherness they were, like any other human group, no more than a collection of strangers.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)

Here is the truth.What human life is, what it's for, what we do, is create communities.

- Orson Scott Card, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996)