Civic Pride Quotes

Vimes felt a sudden surge of civic pride. There had to be something right about a citizenry which, when faced with catastrophe, thought about selling sausages to the participants.

Nationalism should not be confused with civic values, public spirit, social responsibility, or cultural pride.

Tangier is more New York than New York. ... Then you must see how alike the two places are. The life revolves wholly about the making of money. Practically everyone is dishonest. In New York you have Wall Street, here you have the Bourse. ... In New York you have the slick financiers, here the money changers. In New York you have your racketeers. Here you have your smugglers. And you have every nationality and no civic pride.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be

the gabled eaves, with Legolandish civic pride, the church clock chimes nine golden times; an Alp rears up on every side;

The topics we learn from our four core subjects during our childhood and adolescent stage of our lives help us to understand the norms of common knowledge and take pride of our citizenship.

The intriguing history of American applied toponymy includes a few notoriously unpopular sweeping decisions a year after President Benjamin Harrison created the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. Harrison acted at the behest of several government agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was responsible for mapping the nation's coastline, harbors, and coastal waterways. Troubled by inconsistencies in spelling, board members voted to replace centre with center, drop the ugh from names ending in orough, and shorten the suffix burgh to burg. Overnight, Centreview (in Mississippi) became Centerview, Isleborough (in Maine) became Isleboro, and Pittsburgh (in Pennsylvania) lost its final h and a lot of civic pride. The city was chartered in 1816 as Pittsburg, but the Post Office Department added the extra letter sometime later. Although both spellings were used locally and the shorter version had been the official name, many Pittsburghers complained bitterly about the cost of reprinting stationery and repainting signs. Making the spelling consistent with Harrisburg, they argued, was hardly a good reason for truncating the Iron City's moniker--although Harrisburg was the state capital, it was a smaller and economically less important place. Local officials protested that the board had exceeded its authority. The twenty-year crusade to restore the final h bore fruit in 1911, when the board reversed itself--but only for Pittsburgh. In 1916 the board reaffirmed its blanket change of centre, borough, and burgh as well as its right to make exceptions for Pittsburgh and other places with an entrenched local usage.

Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right,  Ring in the common love of good.  Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old,  Ring in the thousand years of peace.  Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land,  Ring in the Christ that is to be. The

Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.

What about patriotism? Is it permissible for a Christian to be patriotic? Yes and no. It depends on what is meant by patriotism. If by patriotism we mean a benign pride of place that encourages civic duty and responsible citizenship, then patriotism poses no conflict with Christian baptismal identity. But if by patriotism we mean religious devotion to nationalism at the expense of the wellbeing of other nations; if we mean a willingness to kill others (even other Christians) in the name of national allegiance; if we mean an uncritical support of political policies without regard to their justice, then patriotism is a repudiation of Christian baptismal identity. It is extraordinarily naive for a Christian to rule out categorically the possibility of any conflict between their national identity and their baptismal identity. But it’s precisely this kind of naiveté that is on display every time a church flies an American flag above the so-called Christian flag. Or perhaps it’s a bit of unintended truth-telling. Flags are powerful symbols that have the capacity to evoke strong emotions—think of the passion connected with protests involving flag burning. In the world of symbol, flags are among the most revered signs. So when a church flies the American flag above the Christian flag, what is the message being communicated? How can it be anything other than that all allegiances—including allegiance to Christ—must be subordinate to a supreme national allegiance? This is what Caiaphas admitted when he confessed to Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar.”[8] When the American flag is placed in supremacy over all other flags—including a flag intended to represent Christian faith—aren’t we saying our faith is subordinate to our patriotism? Is there any other interpretation? And if you’re inclined to argue that I’m making too much out of the mere arrangement of flags on a church lawn, try reversing them and see what happens! For the “America First” Christian it would create too much cognitive dissonance to actually admit that their loyalty to Christ is penultimate, trumped by their primary allegiance to America, but there are plenty of moments when the truth seeps out.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.

THE THING THAT ENTRANCED ME about Chicago in the Gilded Age was the city’s willingness to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor, a concept so removed from the modern psyche that two wise readers of early drafts of this book wondered why Chicago was so avid to win the world’s fair in the first place. The juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil struck me as offering powerful insights into the nature of men and their ambitions. The more I read about the fair, the more entranced I became. That George Ferris would attempt to build something so big and novel—and that he would succeed on his first try—seems, in this day of liability lawsuits, almost beyond comprehension. A rich seam of information exists about the fair and about Daniel Burnham in the beautifully run archives of the Chicago Historical Society and the Ryerson and Burnham libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago. I acquired a nice base of information from the University of Washington’s Suzallo Library, one of the finest and most efficient libraries I have encountered. I also visited the Library of Congress in Washington, where I spent a good many happy hours immersed in the papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, though my happiness was at times strained by trying to decipher Olmsted’s execrable handwriting. I read—and mined—dozens of books about Burnham, Chicago, the exposition, and the late Victorian era. Several proved consistently valuable: Thomas Hines’s Burnham of Chicago (1974); Laura Wood Roper’s FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (1973); and Witold Rybczynski’s A Clearing in the Distance (1999). One book in particular, City of the Century by Donald L. Miller (1996), became an invaluable companion in my journey through old Chicago. I found four guidebooks to be especially useful: Alice Sinkevitch’s AIA Guide to Chicago (1993); Matt Hucke and Ursula Bielski’s Graveyards of Chicago (1999); John Flinn’s Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893); and Rand, McNally & Co.’ s Handbook to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). Hucke and Bielski’s guide led me to pay a visit to Graceland Cemetery, an utterly charming haven where, paradoxically, history comes alive.

No mining hamlet in the placer gulches of California, nor any backwoods village I ever saw, approached it in picturesque, devil may care abandon.” (This quote is such a point of perverse civic pride that it is reproduced on the wall of the local history museum.)

well-nurtured plants . . . pillars. The royal interest of this psalm in conjunction with the reference to a palace might conjure an image of flourishing civic projects. The splendor of a palace and city was enhanced by ornamental gardens. The Assyrian king Sennacherib (c. 700 BC) boasted that he adorned the city of Nineveh with a “great park” containing all kinds of herbs and fruit trees, and that he allotted plots of land for the people to plant orchards. In addition, he developed an elaborate irrigation system to keep the plantings lush. Similarly, fine architecture was a credit to any monarch who experienced success in his reign. Sennacherib spoke of the elaborate portico of his palace with copper and cedar pillars to support the grand doors. Such pillars were sometimes carved in human shape. This psalm draws on such images to describe the blessing of offspring who flourish as the most important pride of any community (see notes on 127:1, 4–5).

Our own personal history with money can affect our relationships in surprising ways. It’s important to explore what your family legacy is about money, generosity, power, and wealth. What emotional history and thoughts do you have about being poor, about being dependent and independent, about being strong and being weak, about philanthropy, civic responsibility, luxury, and pride of accomplishment? When two people with two separate histories with money get together, they must face the challenge of merging those two histories—or deal with the consequences of not addressing them. The first step is to understand your own history. The second step is to understand your partner’s history.

Voters have soaked up a noggin full of negativity over the last twenty years, with an economy we had to bring back from collapse, plus terrorist attacks and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t want to belabor these points, but your listeners know what I’m talking about. I think the antidote is to appreciate what we have, enjoy where we live, and make a positive contribution to our communities. My Cracker Pride campaign is balanced by the spirit of Cincinnatus. He was a farmer and Roman general who was twice made dictator. And he had the forbearance to resign as dictator as soon as he had vanquished Rome’s enemies. He became a civic ideal for good leadership. That’s the spirit I want in my district and in my campaign. - Veda Rabadel, The Tea & Crackers Campaign.

Mattheson was perhaps too clever for his own good; nonetheless the smart money was on this sophisticated and broadly educated polymath. Later on he wrote about music from the vantage point of practical experience, not only as an observer but also as a trained professional. He considered opera houses essential to civic pride, a necessity, like having efficient banks: ‘The latter provide for general security, the former for education and refreshment … where the best banks are, so too are the best opera houses,’ he maintained.

In 1904, Californian journalist Lincoln Steffens published an exposé entitled The Shame of the Cities. Steffens wrote that “politics is business. In America politics is an arm of business and the aim of business is to make money without care for the law, because politics, controlled by business, can change or buy the law. Politics is interested in profit, not municipal prosperity or civic pride. The spirit of graft and lawlessness is the American spirit.

If now -- and this is my idea -- there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation. Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one's life. I spoke of the "moral equivalent" of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until and equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skilful propogandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities. The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree if its imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as part history has inflamed the military temper.

As soon as the half-red, half-gray Honda Civic peeled out of the lot, I turned back to Champ with a puffed-up sense of pride at my success. “Am I forgiven?” “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll ask my husband. The gun-toting drag queen.” I pointed at him. “May you be so lucky. If you weren’t a workaholic, you could totally land a nice buxom queen instead of that big, callused hand you’re married to now.

What about patriotism? Is it permissible for a Christian to be patriotic? Yes and no. It depends on what is meant by patriotism. If by patriotism we mean a benign pride of place that encourages civic duty and responsible citizenship, then patriotism poses no conflict with Christian baptismal identity. But if by patriotism we mean religious devotion to nationalism at the expense of the wellbeing of other nations; if we mean a willingness to kill others (even other Christians) in the name of national allegiance; if we mean an uncritical support of political policies without regard to their justice, then patriotism is a repudiation of Christian baptismal identity. It is extraordinarily naive for a Christian to rule out categorically the possibility of any conflict between their national identity and their baptismal identity. But it’s precisely this kind of naiveté that is on display every time a church flies an American flag above the so-called Christian flag.

In articulating their theory of growth machines, Logan and Molotch contrast the exchange value of land (its economic worth) with its use value (value as living space) to illustrate the conflicting interests of developer-led growth coalitions focused on exchange value and the interests of city residents on use value. In North America, according to the two authors, exchange regularly trumps use. This fact underlies the development of a growth machine. Growth machines develop in the following manner: place entrepreneurs see the potential for profit from the development and intensification of their property holdings, namely, through the increase in rent. These "rentiers" develop a close relationship with other local business interests. In particular, businesses that rely on the growth of a city to increase their profitability, such as newspapers, are likely to support the interests of developers. Developers and their allies, through constant interaction with government, through ample campaign contributions, and through their ability to organize and mobilize, can co-opt local politicians, effectively coercing their involvement in the growth coalition. They supply politicians with the funds necessary to run effective election campaigns. Politicians, in turn, along with local media and other members of the growth coalition, help to perpetuate a link between civic pride and a city's economic and physical growth. This link undermines interest in the use value of land (specifically the use and maintenance of existing areas) as the city focuses increasingly on growth. Molotch argues in a later article that this coalition of growth interests reflected the most common political coalition in American cities, while acknowledging its limited applicability elsewhere. He argues that Americans' acceptance of developers' actions " as the baseline of urban process, rather than as disruptions," is evidence that Americans take developers' "presence for granted"....Numerous authors, in adopting growth machine theory, also added anti-growth citizen coalitions to the mix. Current analyses adopting the theory now invariably include the neighborhood-association-led anti-growth coalition as the foil of the developer-led growth coalition.

Whether they were Jews or Gentiles, most of John’s readers were used to belonging to a city. Most citizens of the great cities of the province of Asia would have thought it possible to be fully human only in the public life of a city. For those of John’s readers who had the social status and affluence sufficient to participate in this public life – and probably many of them did – the most difficult and alien aspect of Christianity would have been the extent to which it required them to dissociate and to distance themselves from this public life, because of the idolatry and immorality bound up with it. There is plenty of evidence in the seven messages to the churches to show how disinclined many of them were to do this. Not only a comfortable life, participating in the prosperity of the cities’ economic life, was at stake, though this was a major factor. There was also the need to belong to the civic community, with its rituals of identity and civic pride. And in the first century AD this was inseparable from the public and official enthusiasm for their connexion with Rome which the cities of Asia displayed. Of course, for the poor among John’s readers belonging to a city and to the Roman Empire would have had more ambivalent, though not always merely negative, connotations.

There was jealous admiration: of beggars for commoners, of commoners for gentry, of gentry for nobility, of nobility for royalty, all twisting their necks looking always up to what they didn’t quite have. There was warlike enthusiasm, mostly from those who’d never drawn a sword in their lives, since those used to swinging them tend to know better. There was patriotic fervour enough to drown an island full of foreign scum, and righteous delight that the Union made the best young bastards in the world. There was civic pride from the denizens of mighty Adua, City of White Towers, for no one breathed vapours so thick or drank water as dirty as they did, nor paid so much for rooms so small.

hundreds of decorated automobiles and elaborate floats, one featuring a roaring lion, declawed for the occasion but symbolizing the fierce determined spirit of the city, was turned out for two hundred and fifty thousand gasping Angelenos thronged in the streets to marvel at in wondrous civic pride.

Not since the days of Athens and Sparta had Europe seen an era of violent civic pride like the one that covered the Italian peninsula in the age of Dante and Marco Polo. But then the trend changed. The days of affluence and confidence ebbed away. The coming of the Black Death in 1348, which killed off at least one-third of Italy’s population, was the coup de grâce. The wars became more desperate and the mercenary captain or condottiere, who led a city’s army to plunder its neighbors, more necessary.

The town hall, which looked as if it had been designed by a committee of morons in an excess of alcohol and civic pride, stood in isolated splendour bounded by two bombed sites where rebuilding had only just begun.

In many traditional societies, the political head is also a spiritual leader, and in others the secular leader is limited by ancient religious teachings. We Americans pride ourselves on separating church and state, rightly worried that citizens may lose freedoms if politicians mix their religious beliefs with their political agendas. But as a result we have created a wholly secular state that can't truly govern a people, because its activities ignore the needs of the soul and play out as if a human community were a mere aggregate of inanimate bodies. How could we run a country according to the most recent reckoning of pollsters unless we considered citizens as mere numbers?...If we could distinguish between a basic religious attitude and a system of beliefs, we might bring to our civic lives a spirit of reverence, an acknowledgement of mystery, and an appreciation for ritual, all in an atmosphere of tolerance.

by patriotism we mean a benign pride of place that encourages civic duty and responsible citizenship, then patriotism poses no conflict with Christian baptismal identity. But if by patriotism we mean religious devotion to nationalism at the expense of the wellbeing of other nations; if we mean a willingness to kill others (even other Christians) in the name of national allegiance; if we mean an uncritical support of political policies without regard to their justice, then patriotism is a repudiation of Christian baptismal identity.