Citizen service is the very American idea that we meet our challenges not as isolated individuals but as members of a true community, with all of us working together. Our mission is nothing less than to spark a renewed sense of obligation, a new sense of duty, a new season of service.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of community service and collective responsibility in addressing challenges.
William J. Clinton's quote highlights the American ideal of communal engagement, asserting that individuals should come together to overcome challenges rather than face them in isolation. It calls for a revitalized sense of duty and commitment to service, urging everyone to contribute to the welfare of the community and enhance the spirit of collaboration.
In practice
In a speech about volunteerism, one could say, 'As William J. Clinton emphasized, citizen service embodies the essence of community, motivating us to come together for a greater cause.'
You know, there was a recent poll which said that young people in the generation of the students here felt it was far more likely that they would see a UFO than that they would draw Social Security... It's very important you understand this. Once you understand this, you realize this is not an episode from the X Files, and you're not more likely to see a UFO if you do certain specific things.
When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly...When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it.
For too long we've been told about 'us' and 'them.' Each and every election we see a new slate of arguments and ads telling us that 'they' are the problem, not 'us.' But there can be no 'them' in America. There's only us.
There is a huge body of business evidence now showing that energy savings give better service at lower cost with higher profit. We have to tear down barriers to successful markets and we have to create incentives to enter them.
Demand that your government pays more attention. It's immoral that people in Africa die like flies of diseases that no one dies of in the United States. And the more disease there is, the more political unrest there will be, leading to more Darfurs, which the U.S. will have to pay to fix.
I was not elected to produce a pile of vetoes.
There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.
Christian community is the place where we keep the flame of hope alive among us and take it seriously so that it can grow and become stronger in us.
The Universe is circles within circles, and everything is one circle, and all the circles are connected to each other. Each family is a circle, and those family circles connect together and make a community, and the community makes its circle where it lives on the Earth. It (the community) cares for that part (of the Earth) but cares for it as a circle - which is to say in a cooperative and egalitarian way, where everybody is cared for, and everybody is respected.
We see community organizations as major service providers and economic drivers rather than as recipients or distributors of charity, and coordinators of volunteers. Today they constitute what's referred to as 'the social economy'.
But the people of the disaster area fundamentally needed to understand that the rest of Australia had noticed their misery and their stoicism and their intense sense of community and determination to arise from the sodden wreckage of their homes, and that Australians would dig deep to help. I helped to describe the community ethos which quickly triumphed over incipient despair. It is this mobilisation of the unifying spirit that thrills us all, even as we mourn.
Invitation is not only a step in bringing people together, it is also a fundamental way of being in a community. It manifests the willingness to live in a collaborative way. This means that a future can be created without having to force or sell it or barter for it. When we believe that barter or subtle coercion is necessary, we are operating out of a context of scarcity and self-interest, the core currencies of the economist.
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