Quotes About Citizenship

What we want to do is to give all children and grandchildren of Holocaust victims the opportunity to become Austrian citizens if they want to.

I'd much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym, you'll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you'll realise that you're a full-class citizen. You have the potential to make money from the system.

My father told me about American democracy. And he said you have to be actively engaged in the political process to make our democracy work. So I've been doing that my entire life. Civil rights movement. The peace movement during the Vietnam conflict. The movement to get an apology and redress for Japanese-Americans.

If your neighbor has a completely different view on abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, all of those things, you still are both Americans. Neither one of you is necessarily more patriotic than the other. Neither loves their country any more than the other one does.

We work together to get things done every damn day. Most Americans don't live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals, or conservatives. Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do, often something they do not want to do. But they do it, impossible things every day that are only made possible through the little, reasonable compromises we all make.

Men talk of the Negro problem," he began. "There is no Negro problem," he said, his voice rising. "The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution."123

The government isn't the mob, Harry. Aren't they? I asked. Pay them money every year to protect you, and God help you if you don't.

I don't think there should even be a president, man. I think we should have total democracy.

And I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense -- I tell you it is an act of patriotism.

Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.

I'd rather see the United States as a beacon of good work and good citizenship, rather than as #1 on some international educational measurement.

A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high virtues of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation.

I ask the rights to pursue happiness by having a voice in that government to which I am accountable.

Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.

Even if refugees, undocumented immigrants, and legal immigrants are not all potential billionaires, that is no reason to exclude them. Even if their fate is to be the high-school dropout and the fast-food cashier, so what? That makes them about as human as the average American, and we are not about to deport the average American (are we?).

in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren't. Funnily enough, I had never felt inferior because of my race during my foreign student days. I was foreign by definition and therefore was treated as a guest. But now, even though I was a card-carrying American with a driver's license, Social Security card, and resident alien permit, Violet still considered me as foreign, and

By the time I returned to campus, however, the students were of a new breed, not interested in politics or the world like the previous generation. Their tender eyes were no longer exposed daily to stories and pictures of atrocity and terror for which they might have felt responsible, given that they were citizens of a democracy destroying another country in order to save it.

Their tender eyes were no longer exposed daily to stories and pictures of atrocity and terror for which they might have felt responsible, given that they were citizens of a democracy destroying another country in order to save it.

Each belt buckle that German soldiers wore had embossed upon it 'Got Mitt Uns' (God Is With Us). Over the door of the courthouse in the Palace of Justice complex in Nuremberg were engraved the Ten Commandments. The group that established those commandments was precisely the group that was deprived of citizenship, human rights, and even life, under the laws promulgated in the name of that very city—the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

A free people should be governed by law and not by the whims of men.

Education, all smoothly say, is the production of useful citizens. But, good God, what on earth is a useful citizen just now?

I do feel very American. I think it's something I'm proud of and proud to be by chance born here. Honestly, that's something I think about.

We started a movement... to build character, citizenship and confidence in young people.

We still go out and elect people who we think are going to govern and better our interests. So we may not have the same confidence in the people we elect, but we still go out and elect them.