Physically robust infrastructure is not enough if it fails to foster a healthy community; ultimately, all infrastructure is social.
Interpretation
Infrastructure alone is insufficient without community support; social aspects are vital for its success.
This quote by Pete Buttigieg emphasizes the importance of community in the success of infrastructure. While having strong physical structures may seem vital, it is the social connections and the health of the community that truly determine the effectiveness and sustainability of those structures. In essence, good infrastructure must be complemented by a vibrant, engaged community that can utilize and maintain it.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about community development at a local government meeting.
'Freedom' means a lot to conservatives, but they have such a narrow sense of what it means. They think a lot about freedom from - freedom from government, freedom from regulation - and precious little about freedom to. Freedom to is absolutely something that has to be safeguarded by good government, just as it could be impaired by bad government.
We need to intentionally invest in health, in home ownership, in entrepreneurship, in access to democracy, in economic empowerment. If we don't do these things, we shouldn't be surprised that racial inequality persists because inequalities compound.
My understanding of my faith is that - through a Christian framework - part of what we are called to do is to lay down our own self-interests, after the model of divinity that comes into this world in the form of Christ and lays down his life. And in order to do that, you have to care about something or someone more than yourself.
So much of politics is about people's relationships with themselves. You do better if you make people feel secure in who they are.
Experiences with friends or family members coming out have helped millions of Americans to see past stereotypes and better understand what being gay is - and is not.
The most moving responses I got to my coming out in the first place was people, like teenagers, letting me know that it made their lives easier in some way.
Risk always looks different when you're beating the system than when you've been beaten.
Opinions which justify cruelty are inspired by cruel impulses.
Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in possession and under our direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?
I work a lot with blind people in my spare time outside of Unilever, and I count my blessings every day.
We humans are more concerned with having than with being.
Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.
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