“The city-state was the means by which the Greek consciously strove to make the life both of the community and of the individual more excellent than it was before.”

“No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or twohundred buildings to the square mile, shall be built or permitted to existanywhere in the United States of America.”

“Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.”

“In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.”

“And "sharing the work of survival," therefore, means resisting every temptation towards independence, towards personal liberty, towards "doing your own thing". This takes s sober vigilance and a persistent labour in a world which elevates the individual above the community, in a society which claims that individual desires are more important than contracts, commitments, and the good of the family”

“If we live in a world of states, and if out-of-state existence is impossible, then we all must live as national citizens. We are the nation, and the nation is us. This is as fundamental as it is an inescapable reality. Nationalism engulfs both the individual and the collective; it produces the 'I' and 'We' dialectically and separately. Not only does nationalism produce the community and its individual members: it is itself the community and its realized individual subjects, for without these there is no nationalism."Leading sociologists and philosophers have emphasized the pervasive presence of the community in individual consciousnesses, where the social bond is an essential part of the self. It is not only that the 'I' is a member of the 'We,' but, more importantly, that the 'We' is a necessary member of the 'I.' It is an axiom of sociological theory, writes Scheler, that all human knowledge 'precedes levels of self-contagiousness of one's self-value. There is no "I" without "We." The "We" is filled with contents prior to the "I." ' Likewise, Mannheim emphasizes ideas and thought structures as functions of social relations that exist within the group, excluding the possibility of any ideas arising independently of socially shared meanings. The social reality of nationalism not only generates meanings but is itself a 'context of meaning'; hence our insistence that nationalism constitutes and is constituted by the community as a social order. 'It is senseless to pose questions such as whether the mind is socially determined, as though the mind and society each posses a substance of their own' [citing Pressler and Dasilva's Sociology]. The profound implications of the individual's embeddedness in the national community is that the community's ethos is prior and therefore historically determinative of all socioepistemic phenomena. And if thought structures are predetermined by intellectual history, by society's inheritance of historical forms of knowledge, then those structures are also a priori predetermined by the linguistic structures in which this history is enveloped, cast, and framed.Like law, nationalism is everywhere: it creates the community and shapes world history even before nationalism comes into it.”