“Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.”

— Sherman Alexie, book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Last update Feb. 7, 2022. History

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Native American author and filmmaker 1966

Robert Axelrod The evolution of cooperation

Axelrod, Robert, and William Donald Hamilton. "The evolution of cooperation." Science 211.4489 (1981): 1390

“The idea of community presupposes the idea of something in common as well as the idea of community members who have in common what is held in common. [...] Perhaps there is only one and the same reality, one and the same essence, of community and its members. Let us give a name right away to this single and essential reality of the community and its members: life. So, we can already say that the essence of community is life; every community is a community of living beings.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 118-119
Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

“What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.”

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) English crime writer, playwright, essayist and Christian writer

Essays, Are Women Human? (1938)

“Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

1970s and later

“A community of vices is a closer and more direct bond between human beings than a community of virtues.”

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) Novelist, short story writer, essayist (1854-1909)

The Novel: What It Is (1893)

“The physical life of an individual person is limited, but the life of the masses united as an independent social-political organism is immortal.… Only when an individual becomes a member of this community can he acquire the immortal social-political life.”

Kim Jong-il (1941–2011) General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea

Source: "Theory of the Immortal Social-Political Body" (1986)

“The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

As quoted in Encounter with Martin Buber (1972) by Aubrey Hodes, p. 135

“.. the unrelenting Berlin forced each one of us to struggle through on the most individual paths, so that our communal living [of 'Brücke', in 1913] fell apart. In addition, the knowledge of the individual members had developed so far that the individual form differed, although the overall goal of the group remained the same.”

Max Pechstein (1881–1955) German artist

a later quote of Pechstein; as quoted in Brücke und Berlin: 100 Jahre Expressionismus, ed. Anita Beloubek-Hammer; Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 2005, p. 266 (transl. Claire Albiez)
about the cause of the break-up of Die Brücke group in 1913: the harsh city-life of Berlin. Pechstein himself already was removed from the Brücke group in 1912 (one year before the definite break) because he went against the self-imposed rule of die Brücke to only exhibit together - when he decided to show also his art at the 'Berliner Secession'.

“To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.”

Peter Singer book Practical Ethics

Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews - Richard Dawkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYYNY2oKVWU, 2009. <br class="br">Source: Practical Ethics <br class="br">Context: Speciesism is an attitude of prejudice towards beings because they're not members of our species, so just as racism means that you're prejudiced against beings who are not members of your race and sexism means you're prejudiced against people of the other sex. So we humans tend to be speciesist in we think that any being that is a member of the species homo sapien just automatically has a higher moral status and is more important than any being that is a member of any other species, irrespective of the actual characteristics of those beings.

“The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is what? The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.”

Jeremy Bentham book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

Source: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789; 1823), Ch. 1: Of the Principle of Utility

“Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.”

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