Peter Block > Quotes

“Why do anything unless it is going to be great?”
― Peter Block

“The goal is to balance a life that works with a life that counts.”
― Peter Block

“The key to creating or transforming community, then, is to see the power in the small but important elements of being with others. The shift we seek needs to be embodied in each invitation we make, each relationship we encounter, and each meeting we attend. For at the most operational and practical level, after all the thinking about policy, strategy, mission, and milestones, it gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together?”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“• We are a community of possibilities, not a community of problems. • Community exists for the sake of belonging and takes its identity from the gifts, generosity, and accountability of its citizens. It is not defined by its fears, its isolation, or its penchant for retribution. • We currently have all the capacity, expertise, programs, leaders, regulations, and wealth required to end unnecessary suffering and create an alternative future.”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“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.”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“The interest we have in problems is so intense that at some point we take our identity from those problems. Without them, it seems like we would not know who we are as a community. Many of the strongest advocates for change would lose their sense of identity if the change they desired ever occurred.”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“The choice to worry about why we are doing something more than how we do something is risky business.”
― Peter Block, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters

“Maybe the unvarnished meaning of growing up is the acceptance that living out our values, and also winning the approval of those who have power over us, is an unfulfillable longing.”
― Peter Block, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters

“each technique carries a consistent message more important than any method: that each act that expresses trust in ourselves and belief in the validity of our own experience is always the right path to follow. Each act that is manipulative or filled with pretense is always self-destructive.”
― Peter Block, Flawless Consulting, Enhanced Edition: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used

“We decide to move far enough to the edge of the culture to see it clearly. What is the norm and normal does not serve us well. Many of us have tried hard to live a “normal” life, and how is it going?”
― Peter Block, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters

“If we want to follow the signs of the times, we have to look at how our core economic beliefs have produced a culture that makes poverty, violence, ill health, and fragile economic systems seem inevitable. Economic systems based on competition, scarcity, and acquisitiveness have become more than a question of economics; they have become the kingdom within which we dwell. That way of thinking invades our social order, our ways of being together, and what we value. It replicates the kingdom of ancient Egypt, Pharaoh’s kingdom. It produces a consumer culture that centralizes wealth and power and leaves the rest wanting what the beneficiaries of the system have.”
― Peter Block, An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture

“What makes community building so complex is that it occurs in an infinite number of small steps, sometimes in quiet moments that we notice out of the corner of our eye. It calls for us to treat as important many things that we thought we incidental. An afterthought becomes the point; a comment made in passing defines who we are more than all that came before. If the artist is one who captures the nuance of experience, then this is whom each of us must become.”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“Understand that the task is to shift the demand for the right answer to the search for the right question.”
― Peter Block, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters

“We change the world when we create the time and space for heartfelt, unique conversations that discuss values and affirm doubts, feelings, and intuition.”
― Peter Block, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters

“The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole.”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“the search for human freedom—freedom being the choice to be a creator of our own experience and accept the unbearable responsibility that goes with that. Out of this insight grows the idea that perhaps the real task of leadership is to confront people with their freedom. This may be the ultimate act of love that is called for from those who hold power over others.”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“One aspect of our fragmentation is the gaps between sectors of our cities and neighborhoods; businesses, schools, social service organizations, churches, government operate mostly in their own worlds. Each piece is working hard on its own purpose, but parallel effort added together does not make a community. Our communities are separated into silos; they are a collection of institutions and programs operating near one another but not overlapping or touching. This is important to understand because it is this dividedness that makes it so difficult to create a more positive or alternative future—especially in a culture that is much more interested in individuality and independence than in interdependence. The work is to overcome this fragmentation.”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“The conventional approach to community building and development addresses problem areas such as public safety, jobs and local economy, affordable housing, youth, universal health care, and education. Every city has thousands of institutions, programs, and agencies all committed to serving the public good. From the standpoint of building community and social capital, these institutions and programs are just treating the symptoms. Safety, jobs, housing, and the rest are symptoms of the unreconciled and fragmented nature of the community—what Lopez calls the breakdown of community. This fragmentation or breakdown creates a context where trying to solve the symptoms only sustains them. Otherwise, why have we been working on these symptoms for so long and so hard; and even with so many successful programs, why have we seen too little fundamental change?”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“You do not have enough, therefore you are not enough” is a powerful belief sustaining the market. The faith communities must believe “You are enough, and therefore you have enough.” And so must we all.”
― Peter Block, An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture

“We want desperately to take uncertainty out of the future. But when we take uncertainty out, it is no longer the future. It is the present projected forward. Nothing new can come from the desire for a predictable tomorrow. The only way to make tomorrow predictable is to make it just like today. In fact, what distinguishes the future is its unpredictability and mystery.”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“In his book Lincoln at Gettysburg: Words That Remade America, Garry Wills (2006) argues that it was Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address who transformed America’s individualism-oriented Constitution, with all its checks and balances, into a vision of the common good. Lincoln is the de facto godfather of the common good.”
― Peter Block, An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture

“Dissent, as a form of refusal, becomes authentic when it is a choice for its own sake. When it is an act of accountability. Authentic dissent is recognizable by the absence of blame, the absence of resignation. Blame, denial, rebellion, and resignation have no power to create. A
simple no begins a larger conversation, or at least creates the space for one. This is most clearly embodied when we realize there is nothing to argue about. Once again, when faced with a no, or doubts, or authentic refusal, we move forward when we get interested and curious. The ultimate expression of useful power is a leader’s saying, “I must warn you that if you argue with me, I will likely be forced to take your side.”
― peter block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“Dissent is the cousin of diversity; the respect for a wide range of beliefs. This begins by allowing people the space to say “no.” If we cannot say “no” then “yes” has no meaning”
― Peter Block

“Questions that are designed to change other people are the wrong questions. Wrong, not because they don’t matter or are based on ill intent, but because they reinforce the problem-solving model. They are questions that are the cause of the very thing we are trying to shift: the fragmented and retributive nature of our communities.”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“When we shift from talking about the problems of community to talking about the breakdown of community, something changes. Naming the challenge as the “breakdown of community” opens the way for restoration.Holding on to the view that community is a set of problems to be solved holds us in the grip of retribution. At every level of society, we live in the landscape of retribution. The retributive community is sustained by several aspects of the modern community conversation, which I will expand on throughout the book: the marketing of fear and fault, gravitation toward more laws and oversight, an obsession with romanticized leadership, marginalizing hope and possibility, and devaluing associational life to the point of invisibility.”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“We can create structures of belonging even if we are introverted”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“We recognize the difference between being a citizen and being a consumer. The difference between subject and object. Citizens have the capacity to create for themselves whatever they require. Citizens have power, customers have needs.”
― Peter Block, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters

“The rising tide does not lift all boats. Those at the bottom and at the margin are considered undeserving; they are today’s equivalent of scripture’s widows, orphans, and immigrants.”
― Peter Block, An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture

“Acting on what matters means that we will consistently find ourselves feeling like we are living on the margin of our institutions and our culture. This calls for some detachment from the mainstream.”
― Peter Block, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters

“In summary, (1) one gets complete with the past, which takes it out of the future (being complete with the past is not to forget the past); (2) in the room that is now available in the future when one’s being and action are no longer shaped by the past, one creates a future (a future that moves, touches, and inspires one); (3) that future starts to shape one’s being and actions in the present so that they are consistent with realizing that future.”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging