Quotes About Citizenship

America is the place where you cannot kill your Government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern. —Woodrow Wilson, 1919

The sheer size of the country, the mixed ethnic, religious, and racial composition of the people, and the diffuseness of power under our federal system have all tended to blunt or minimize citizen-versus-state conflicts and to throw citizen-versus-citizen conflicts into high relief.

I want to make an extremely strong appeal to those who abstained. Vote. It takes five minutes and then it's for five years.

I am an Australian citizen, and I miss my country a great deal.

Next, we will create a modern immigration law.

I am rather proud of my modest contribution to bringing democracy home.

Democracy without morality is impossible.

A people morally and intellectually equal to self-government must also be equal in self-defence.

I personally believe that a democratic society is morally entitled to set and enforce a limit on the number of new immigrants admitted each year.

Democrats believe that when more people vote, it's not just good for our party; it's good for democracy.

Our founders said that everybody mattered, everybody counted. But we all know that they didn't count everybody at the beginning. They did somehow have confidence that each generation of Americans would do a better job with it and would bring more and more people in from the margins and into the heart and soul of our democracy.

Politics is about everything we do from the moment we get up in the morning to the minute we go to bed at night. It's something everybody and anybody can be involved in.

All I ever want is to return to either Bangladesh, my motherland, or India, my adopted home.

That's my whole motivation in life - to educate people to become better a citizen, better person, better son, and better father.

we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.

Women would then need to resort to the ballot box to request that protection—assuming the majority sees fit to give them the right/privilege to vote.

Once slavery was abolished, the core of the changes that followed was found in the Fourteenth Amendment, which for the first time defined the terms of American citizenship and declared that no state could deprive people of their natural rights or the traditional rights inherited through the common law. Yet shortly afterwards, that amendment was crippled by a Supreme Court decision known as The Slaughter-House Cases.

According to the social compact tradition articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, government is legitimate because the people consent to it, thus agreeing in some sense to respect its determinations. But people can consent only because they have a basic right to decide whether or not to consent, a right that is not a mere privilege from the government.

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

The complexity of the so-called individual that's been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the 'me'. When I was a young girl we were called citizens – American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did – consume. Now they don't use those words any more – it's the American taxpayer and those are different attitudes.

This slide of people [refugees] has freighted the concept of citizenship and altered our perceptions of space - public and private. The strain has been marked by a plethora of hyphenated designations of national identity.

Our citizenship is in heaven" (Philippians 3:20a). That's our home. That's the kingdom to which we belong. We just work down here. Understanding this key spiritual truth is fundamental to all we do on earth.

But republics and democracies exist only by virtue of the engagement of their citizens in the management of public affairs. If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants.