Quotes About Citizenship

They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.

These policies create a reality where a Jewish citizen of any other country who has never been to Israel can move there or to a West Bank settlement and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian refugee expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country cannot move to either Israel or the OPT.

To step down there now as if completely free, to be released from the arduous states of play of psychological condition, to have leisure to be open and attentive to perception, to the world whose breathtaking, incessant cascade against the senses was so easily and habitually ignored, dinned out, in the interests of unexamined ideals of personal responsibility, efficiency, citizenship, to step down there now, just walk away, melt into the shadow, would be so very easy.

The litmus test of any democracy is the level of tolerance it is willing to extend towards the minorities living in it. In this respect, Israel falls far short of being a true democracy.

As I tell young people in workshops, 'It's your country. If you came here on the bottom of a slave ship, if your people came here seeking political freedom - however your folks got here - it belongs to you just as much as it belongs to anyone, so claim it. It's your birthright. America belongs to every person who is here.'

Frequent worshippers are also significantly more active citizens. They are more likely to belong to community organizations, especially those concerned with young people, health, arts and leisure, neighborhood and civic groups and professional associations.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college - the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes - the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That's what America is about.

1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen.

I came across this circumstance of undocumented students. These are kids who were brought to this country as youngsters, who are raised as Americans and go to American schools, and then when they graduate high school, they have no prospects in front of them because they are undocumented and illegally in the United States.

Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.

My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

I pay my tax in the belief that you pay yours. I pay for your doctor's visit, in the belief that you pay for mine. In Denmark we don't have gold mines, but we have something more important. We have trust in one another.

To be a good citizen, it's important to be able to put yourself in other people's shoes and see the big picture. If everything you see is rooted in your own identity, that becomes difficult or impossible.

Of course voting is useful. But then again, I don't put a big glow to it. Voting is about as essential as washing yourself. It's something you're supposed to do. Now, you can't go around bragging, expecting to get props because you voted. That's stupid.

Not less, but more democracy - that is the demand, that is the great goal that we have to prescribe for ourselves, and especially for our youth.

Perhaps there should be a box on the census form that says, 'I'm a criminal.' Everyone who has ever committed a crime would be required to check it. If everyone were forced to acknowledge their own criminality, maybe we, as a nation, would second-guess our apparent zeal for denying full citizenship to those branded felons.

It is not an exaggeration to say that under Obama, the naturalization process - becoming a citizen - no longer requires becoming an American. The real tragedy and the real crime of the Obama plan for accelerated naturalization of millions flows from the redefinition of citizenship as a triumph of multiculturalism.

We think that democracy can change a lot of things, but we're being fooled, because democracy is not the election. We've been taught that democracy is having elections. And it isn't. Elections are the most horrendous aspect of democracy. It's the most mundane, trivial, disappointing, dirty aspect.

The country is too often assumed to be a backward place: The First World has trouble remembering that Haitians were two centuries ahead of us in abolishing slavery and in extending full rights of citizenship to everyone, regardless of race.

I think every American has a role in saving this country. Whether you're Democrat, Republican, independent, it doesn't matter. We all know the country's in trouble. We may disagree on how to solve it, but we all know the country's in trouble.

A thing that really troubles me about a more polarized society is that you stop having a sense of society and citizenship.

I got a big truck, just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take 'em home myself.

True republicanism is the sovereignty of the people. There are natural and imprescriptible rights which an entire nation has no right to violate.

When you come to America, you get to become an American, and Trump, who has grandparents who came to the U.S., should understand this as much as anybody.