Quotes About Citizenship

Someone who does an act. In a democratic society, you're supposed to be an activist; that is, you participate. It could be a letter written to an editor.

The American Revolution was carried out in the name of the people, and it was supposedly 'We, the people,' who created the government that Americans still live under.

In my view, the government has ample justification to inquire about citizenship status on the census and could plainly provide rationales for doing so that would satisfy the Supreme Court.

As a citizen of a community, if you never vote or engage, don't be surprised when the outcome doesn't serve your interests; you've never done anything to push things in the right direction.

Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.

In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.

We have, most of us, a deep desire for this democratic public life, for a voice, for membership, for purpose and meaning that cannot be only personal. We want larger selves and a larger world.

Festus allowed Paul to go to Rome because Paul claimed to be a Roman citizen. Paul was born in Tarsus, a city whose inhabitants had been granted Roman citizenship by Mark Anthony a century earlier. As a citizen, Paul had the right to demand a Roman trial. a Festus, who would serve as governor for an extremely brief and tumultuous period in Jerusalem , seemed happy to grant him one, if for no other reason than simply be rid of him.

Among Romans, crucifixion originated as a deterrence against revolt of slaves, probably as early as 200 B.C.E. By Jesus's time, it was the primary form of punishment for inciting rebellion (i.e., treason or sedition) the exact crime which Jesus was charged.[..] The punishment applied solely to non-Roman citizens. Roman citizens could be crucified, however, if the crime was so grave that it essentially forfeited their citizenship.

All the Founding Fathers, whatever their private religious beliefs, would have been aghast to read the journalist Robert Sherman's report of George Bush Senior's answer when Sherman asked him whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists: 'No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Take up citizenship and the conversion it entailed, send a couple of your sons to the levy when they were of age, pay taxes calculated not to drive you and your family into penury or the mountains and the life of a bandit. Oh, and while you're at it, steer clear of debt and disease. Chances were — mostly — if you did all that, you'd never starve, never have your home burned down and your children raped before your eyes, never have to wear a slave collar.

Surely, argued the British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73), it was better for a Breton to accept French citizenship "than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage remnant of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world.

Humans have too many rights and not enough responsibilities. -Aras

What is crucial in the true state is not the fact that every citizen has the chance to devote himself to the universal interest in the shape of a particular class, but the capacity of the universal class to be really universal, i.e. to be the class of every citizen.

Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is wrong. There is no other time.

Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.

A state is not a state if it belongs to one man.

There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.

I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution.

American liberty is premised on the accountability of free men and women for what they have done, not for what they may do.

When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions.

A man without a vote is in this land like a man without a hand.

If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.

Our word 'idiot' comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.