Quotes & Sayings About The Oneida Community

Loneliness can drive a person mad. There's a place, in every man's soul, that no friend can reach, only a lover, and he longed for the chance to close that emptiness. — Tionne Rogers

[Nicholson] Baker can't seem to get enough of the wisdom of Gandhi and cites at length an open letter he wrote to the British people on 3 July 1940. "Your soldiers are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans," wrote the Mahatma. "I want you to fight Nazism without arms." He went on to say: "Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them." I must say that everything in me declines to be addressed in that tone of voice — Christopher Hitchens

Back inside, I'm shown an antique cabinet in which members of the community, famous for their homegrown produce, dried herbs.
The Oneida Community was an upstate tourist attraction right from the start, second, Valesky says, to Niagara Falls. I'm taking the same guided tour offered a hundred and fifty years ago to prim rubbernecks who came here to peep at sex fiends. I wonder how many of my vacationing forebears went home disappointed? They thought they were taking the train to Gomorrah but instead they got to watch herbs dry. Valesky opens a drawer in the herb cabinet so I can get a whiff. He mentions that back in the day, when one tourist was shown the cabinet she rudely asked her community-member guide, "What's that odor?" To which the guide replied, "Perhaps it's the odor of crushed selfishness." Valesky grins. "How about that for a utopian answer?" To my not particularly utopian nose, crushed selfishness smells a lot like cilantro. — Sarah Vowell

I still maintain that an ordinary human being has the right to be horrified by a mangled body seen on an afternoon walk. — Timothy Findley

Roz added sheep to Heaven. They would be outside the window, naturally. — Margaret Atwood

He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within. — Barbara W. Tuchman

May you find the courage to pursue your dream. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Thus, for followers of Christ, calling neutralizes the fundamental position of choice in modern life. "I have chosen you," Jesus said, "you have not chosen me." We are not our own; we have been bought with a price. We have no rights, only responsibilities. Following Christ is not our initiative, merely our response, in obedience. Nothing works better to debunk the pretensions of choice than a conviction of calling. Once we have been called, we literally "have no choice. — Os Guinness

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen. — Stanley Elkin

Many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. — Karl Rove

At the same time, popular notions of marriage and the home were challenged on other fronts. Utopian communities experimented with radical new forms of marriage or, as in the Oneida Community, did away with it altogether. The Shakers took up celibacy, the Mormons polygamy; and Charles Knowlton issued an underground best-seller on birth control methods. William Alcott, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and scores of other experts countered — Ann Jones

It goes without saying that in order for me to buy a teapot at the Oneida, Ltd., outlet store at the Sherrill Shopping Plaza, the second coming of Jesus Christ had to have taken place in the year 70 A.D. To the Oneida Community, 70 A.D., the year the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, marks the beginning of the New Jerusalem. Which means we've all been living in heaven on earth for nearly two thousand years. Everyone knows there is no marriage in heaven (though one suspects there's no shortage of it in hell). So, the Oneidans said, we're here in heaven, already saved and perfect in the eyes of God, so let's move upstate and sleep around. (I'm paraphrasing.) — Sarah Vowell

Life should play background music just as in the movies. — Avijeet Das

Some people think God is going to guide those humans. The Oneida community and the Shakers both believed that they had received revelations about how to build the New Jerusalem that the Bible says is coming — Christine Jennings

The Oneida Perfectionists, along with some of the others, believed that feminism, and abolitionism, and other causes that they pursued in their own way without participating with other people outside of their communities, were all piecemeal reforms. That's what makes a utopian a utopian, this idea that they were going to create a whole new world from scratch. — Christine Jennings

When somebody mentions that I did a play with George C. Scott, I'm like, it can't have happened. What was I doing on a Broadway stage at 11 years old? It's so far in the distance now. — Paul Dano

I think that in big-budget movies there's a lot of other stuff going on besides acting, like special effects. — Rachel Weisz

The diplomatic representatives of the United States of America to other nations are almost entirely Jews. — Julius Streicher

(The subject of Peter Gallagher's eyebrows, I realize, is a digression away from the Oneida Community, and yet, I do feel compelled, indeed almost conspiracy theoretically bound to mention that one of the reasons the Oneida Community broke up and turned itself into a corporate teapot factory is that a faction within the group, led by a lawyer named James William Towner, was miffed that the community's most esteemed elders were bogarting the teenage virgins and left in a huff for none other than Orange County, California, where Towner helped organize the Orange County government, became a judge, and picked the spot where the Santa Ana courthouse would be built, a courthouse where, it is reasonable to assume, Peter Gallagher's attorney on The O.C. might defend his clients.) — Sarah Vowell

In the beginning, New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don't think I would have seen as much change if I'd lived in any other city in the world. — Shalom Harlow

One of the things that drives me is the excitement that I could fail. What better buzz can you get? — Calvin Ayre