Quotes from Eric Liu

You want to defend citizenship? Don't persecute or isolate those without papers. Just live like a citizen. That'd be a first-class way to be American.

The summer of 1991, I took $2,000 of my savings and a desktop program, and I asked my friends to write 800 words about something they cared about. I got eight or nine articles and put them together. It was no frills, black and white, no graphics. I printed them out and just dumped piles around D.C.

Have you ever watched someone become American? Last week, at a national citizenship conference I organize, thirty immigrants from 17 countries swore an oath and became citizens of the United States. It was a stirring experience for the hundreds of people in the room.

I know many people on the left are suspicious of words like Americanization. To them, it can sound like a cover for white privilege and warmongering. It suggests arrogance and groupthink. But these connotations are not fixed. It is in our power to reshape them by recalling the best of America.

Jeremy Lin is the only Asian American in the NBA today and one of the few in any professional U.S. sport. His arrival is surely leading other talented Asian American athletes this week to contemplate a pro career.

During the civil rights movement, large majorities of the public thought that Freedom Rides and lunch-counter sit-ins and marches across militarized bridges were counterproductive, and that reform was moving too quickly and disruptively. Today, all those tactics have been sanctified in national memory.

To me, this passage is essentially the Chinese equivalent of the Socratic claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. It has exactly the same rhetorical assertiveness and moral severity: the unexamined life is not just less good; it's useless.

In civically flourishing societies, the people remember that the system is healthiest and most robust when power emerges from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down. In such societies, the people recognize that it is not only fair that power be circulated widely; it is also wise.

we have to be ambitious in our goals, imaginative in our means, ruthless in our evaluations, and aggressive in funding successes and starving failures.

Which is why, from the Inca Empire to the Soviet Union, extractive societies have been prone to collapse. Power naturally flows to the top. We've established that. But where power flows to the top and stays there, without correction or recirculation, a society is likely to die a catastrophic death.

Narrative is the frame upon which we hang selected swaths of experience in order to construct a shelter of meaning.

They share a vision of a society where more people are able to claim and create more power—for themselves, by themselves—against the encroachments of others. And they now share an experience that teaches them that it is both possible and necessary to create power: to activate people who very reasonably could believe that the deck is so stacked against them that there's no point in getting involved.

By deliberately withholding power, you generate more. By choosing to redirect it, you remember that the choice is yours. Such acts remind us how much dormant civic power we actually have—and how infrequently we ever activate that potential in full.

Remind yourself and others that power is in fact infinite—that we can create it where it does not exist. Our final strategy for doing that is simply this: act powerful. When we act powerful we become powerful. That plays out in the poses and stances we strike in civic life, in the art we make together in everyday life, and in the reality of minority rule.

The story of El Centro's creation and flourishing reminds us that civic power may not require a plan—but it does require a purpose.

Change the game: 1. Adjust the arena. 2. Re-rig the rules. 3. Attack the plan. Change the story: 1. Describe the alternative. 2. Organize in narratives. 3. Make your fight a fable. Change the equation: 1. Act exponentially. 2. Act reciprocally. 3. Perform your power.

we exist today because this is how our ancestors behaved. We evolve today by ensuring that our definition of our group os wide enough to take advantage of diversity and narrow enough to be actionable.

Today's multiracial Americans are at greater liberty to choose how they'd like to be seen, and under less pressure to pass for white.

Talk of citizenship today is often thin and tinny. The word has a faintly old-fashioned feel to it when used in everyday conversation. When evoked in national politics, it's usually accompanied by the shrill whine of a descending culture-war mortar.

In the end, a new Americanization movement can't just be about listing our privileges and immunities, which we catalog in our laws. It also has to be about reinforcing our duties, which we convey in our habits.

To be sure, the United States has profound problems, not least our faltering educational and physical infrastructure.

If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.

Like the 'little emperors' of one-child China, too many Boomers were taught early that the world was made (or saved) for their comfort and enjoyment. They behaved accordingly, with a self-indulgence that was wholly rational, given their situation.

Identity in America is complicated but it's also simple: it's about whom you identify with and who identifies with you.