Quotes About Citizenship

When all Americans believe that the people we elect deserve to be in power, that their conduct in office is worthy of respect, and that they can be held accountable for their decisions, our politics will finally be worthy of our great people.

The 'Britishness' debate too often descends into worthy flannel about common values and mutual respect. To give a hard edge to what it means to be British, you have to say what is un-British, and, if necessary, legislate to stop anyone committing un-British acts. Forced marriage falls squarely into this category.

Only Congress can treat the gaping wound that is our broken immigration system.

Why should the PM be placed on such a high pedestal? That an ordinary citizen should not even have the guts to write a letter to the PM?

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.

The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate.

History must share with reading, writing and arithmetic first rank as the most important subjects in the curriculum. Understanding the issues on which citizens of a republic are expected to vote is impossible without an understanding of the past.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people, no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another. Offices were not established to give support to particular men at the public expense. No individual wrong is, therefore, done by removal, since neither appointment to nor continuance in office is a matter of right.

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.

In regard to the law of the state—that is, the accumulated power of society as monopolized by the state—there is no question of right or wrong, but only absolute obedience, the blind conformism of bourgeois society.

Humanity is never acquired in solitude, and never by giving one's work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the 'venture of the public realm.

We have become so used to thinking of domestic politics in terms of party politics that we are inclined to forget that the conflict between [the party system and the council system] has always been a conflict between parliament, the source and seat of power of the party system, and the people, who have surrendered their power to their representatives.

The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or equality before the law and freedom of opinion, formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities, but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.

Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.

I think tax is tough in this country. Every time I sign a cheque to pay tax, it drives me crazy. But at the same time, I'm happy to live here. I want to have a good medical system, good education, good roads, so it's a Catch 22. I hate it, but it's a necessary evil.

I think there's no problem getting through the House a pathway to legal status. A pathway to citizenship is going to be tougher, but I think it is potentially doable, if we can show the American people that the border is secure.

If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service.

I like the U.S. and feel gratitude towards it.

Everyone in our society has had to make a contribution towards dealing with the debts.

My town hall meetings are with friends and neighbors, fellow Americans. We engage.

People who have been hardworking, tax paying, those people ought to be given an opportunity to be on a track that leads towards citizenship, and if that happened, then they wouldn't be prey to the employers who say, 'We want you because we know that you work for a salary we could not lawfully pay anyone else.'

Over the years, dozens of American companies have filed papers to trade in their U.S. corporate citizenship for citizenship in tax haven countries like Bermuda.

It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.