Collectivity Quotes & Sayings

The fool knows nothing of God; he never comes across anything divine. He remains part of the stupid collectivity. Remember, the society, the collective has no soul; the soul belongs to the individual. Hence, those who belong to the collective are destroying every possibility of being souls. — Rajneesh

collectivity, on the other hand, is the place of what the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal calls "divertissement," an untranslatable word which roughly means "distraction" or "diversion": It is the escape from life's problems, and also its invitations, into activities that in ultimate terms are meaningless. It is a constant turning to superficial actions as a way to avoid facing the true realities of human life. The soap operas and situation comedies easily become an addiction. They take the place of the "bread and circuses" of ancient Rome. There was plenty wrong with Roman society and the Roman emperors offered the diversion of food and entertainment to make people forget the banality and meaninglessness of the lives they lived. Our society does much the same and has ever so much more in the way of sophisticated tools for doing so. — William H. Shannon

It's not enough to withdraw from society and seek your own salvation, your own individuation. The individuator must return to society ("collectivity") to contribute his or her new insights, his or her new values, which must be at least equal to if not greater than the norm. — Gary Valentine Lachman

We-skepticism displaces the performative component of the second-person plural as it treats collectivity with suspicion and p1ivileges a fantasy of individual singularity and autonomy. I write "we" hoping to enhance a partisan sense of collectivity. — Anonymous

TV has created a kind of false collectivity. — Adrienne Rich

People yearn to be in one of the best
a combat marine regiment, an elite college, the executive committee of a company, a religious sect, a fraternity, a garden club
any collectivity that can be compared favorably with other, competing groups. — E. O. Wilson

But the long tunnels of art through which I walked in Rome that day had no ragged edges, cowardly colors, or shades of pastel that didn't know what to do with themselves. The wisdom, perfection, and beauty of the colors and forms I passed were more than enough, in their collectivity, to hint at the principles which govern the hereafter, whatever that may be. Indeed, even a detail of one painting can offer solid direction in this regard if one knows how to look — Mark Helprin

The being of any group from the point of view of the group members themselves is very curious. If I think of you and him as together with me, and others again as not with me, I have already formed two rudimentary syntheses, namely, We and Them. However, this private act of synthesis is not in itself a group. In order that We come into being as a group, it is necessary not only that I regard, let us say, you and him and me as We, but that you and he also think of us as We. I shall call such an act of experiencing a number of persons as a single collectivity, an act of rudimentary group synthesis. — R.D. Laing

collectivity of politically astute citizens who, by virtue of our vaunted system of universal education and our freedom of opportunity, would be prepared to govern. — Ralph Ellison

Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive. — Simone De Beauvoir

I think I am slowly becoming an anarchist, that this is only another label for my privateness, and I think that you will understand this in the sense of being against collectivity. — Karel Capek

In our tribunal, we look only at personal criminal responsibility in a very tightly defined, narrow way and we demand proof beyond a resonable doubt about the involvement of the individual. We do no have a mandate to establish the moral responsibility of those who saw things happen and did nothing, including people who might have had the capacity to stop the process and did nothing. But we have to be careful in thinking that just because we focus on individual criminal guilt we therefore absolve the community. The old distinctions are too simplistic when we move up the chain of command and witness the merging of the collectivity into the personae of these charismatic political and military leaders.'
-Louise Arbour, Chief Prosecutor for International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia — Erna Paris

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it. — Simone De Beauvoir

How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one's own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn't this had some effect on my life as a militant
has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation? — Antonio Gramsci

This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends. — Simone De Beauvoir

All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride ... — William James

Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block, betray, or countermand almost any conscious intention of the collectivity. — Frank Herbert

There's a thin line between collectivity and chaos ... — Rita Mae Brown

This is what one of the founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, meant when he wrote in 1895 that the establishment of a sense of community is facilitated by a class of actors who carry a stigma and sense of stigmatization and are termed 'deviant.' Unity is provided to any collectivity by uniting against those who are seen as a common threat to the social order and morality of a group. Consequently, the stigma and the stigmatization of some persons demarcates a boundary that reinforces the conduct of conformists. Therefore, a collective sense of morality is achieved by the creation of stigma and stigmatization and deviance. — Gerhard Falk

Something critical happens when the cadre of bilinguals learns to read imported scrolls: they gain entry into a library. I use the word "library" to refer not to a physical building but, more broadly, to the collectivity of accumulated writings. . . . humans possess an ever-increasing store of writings, the totality of which I call the library. The transformation of an oral culture into a written one means, first and foremost, the potential entry of bilinguals into a library. — Minae Mizumura

The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. — Eric Hoffer

The real principle is that between is used for a relationship of an individual to any number of other individuals, as long as they are being considered two at a time, whereas among is used for a relationship of an individual to an amorphous mass or collectivity. — Steven Pinker

If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Many of the most frequent fallacies in economic reasoning come from the propensity, especially marked today, to think in terms of an abstraction - the collectivity, the "nation" - and to forget or ignore the individuals who make it up and give it meaning. — Henry Hazlitt

We have reached the end of problem solving as a mode of inquiry capable of inspiring, mobilizing, and sustaining human system change. The future of Organization Development belongs to methods that affirm, compel, and accelerate anticipatory learning involving larger and larger levels of collectivity. — David Cooperrider

Meditating together is the best way to feel the collectivity. — Nirmala Srivastava

The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human
being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity. — Terence McKenna

I couldn't see how we could seriously struggle without having a strong sense of collectivity, without being responsible FOR each other and TO each other. — Assata Shakur

Creativity in science is almost always cumulative and collaborative; it proceeds collectively and thus thrives when barriers to collectivity are reduced. — Lewis Hyde

The people themselves are not a homogeneous cultural collectivity but present numerous and variously combined cultural stratifications which, in their pure form, cannot always be identified within specific historical popular collectivities. — Antonio Gramsci

Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view. — Terence McKenna

Nature asserts itself in the face of Spirit which it denies while assuming it; the individual is again found in the collectivity within which he is lost; & each man's death is fulfilled by being cancelled out into the Life of Mankind. — Simone De Beauvoir

[Pragmatism's] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted. — William James

Another potent ideological force is to deprecate the individual and exalt the collectivity of society. For since any given rule implies majority acceptance, any ideological danger to that rule can only start from one or a few independently-thinking individuals. The new idea, much less the new critical idea, must needs begin as a small minority opinion; therefore, the State must nip the view in the bud by ridiculing any view that defies the opinions of the mass. "Listen only to your brothers" or "adjust to society" thus become ideological weapons for crushing individual dissent. By such measures, the masses will never learn of the nonexistence of their Emperor's clothes. — Murray N. Rothbard

The symbolic personage who focuses upon himself a social drama and the martyr may well be born during these days preceding the new moon. They are the incorporation of the need of their collectivity for a new birth of spirit. They call down the creative spirit; they summon forth the future-even if it be through their own death — Dane Rudhyar

Here is the answer to the riddle of love. Love implies relation. If lived in isolation, it becomes selfishness; if absorbed in collectivity, it loses its personality and, therefore, the right to love. — Fulton J. Sheen

The actors are organizations, not individuals. Individuals do the actual fighting, but they fight on behalf of a larger collective political unit, under the direction and coordination of political and/or military leaders, to advance the goals of the collectivity, or at least of its leadership. An individual who acts on his own to kill a border guard, or who crosses a border to kill citizens of another political system, is not engaging in war. But if that individual is part of a political system's formal military organization, and that military organization engages in a sustained campaign of violence against the military organization of another state or another organized group, we would call it a war. — William R. Thompson

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity. — Steve Lacy

One doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent. — Harold Bloom