Quotes About Citizenship

The public must and will be served.

Let the people think they govern and they will be governed

"Vote early and vote often," the advice openly displayed on the election banners in one of our northern cities.

In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

The commands of democracy are as imperative as its privileges and opportunities are wide and generous. Its compulsion is upon us.

Here is a great body of our Jewish citizens from whom have sprung men of genius in every walk of our varied life; men who have conceived of its ideals with singular clearness; and led enterprises with sprit & sagacity... They are not Jews in America, they are American citizens.

We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.

Freedom exists only where people take care of the government.

Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people.

If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.

You catch any white man off guard in here right now, you catch him off guard and ask him what he is, he doesn't say he's an American. He either tells you he's Irish, or he's Italian, or he's German, if you catch him off guard and he doesn't know what you're up to. And even though he was born here, he'll tell you he's Italian. Well, if he's Italian, you and I are African even though we were born here.

I don't even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there'd be no problem. Those Honkies that just got off the boat, they're already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren't Americans yet.

Any time you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil rights of a people, then you are wasting your time going to that government expecting redress. Instead, you have to take that government to the World Court and accuse it of genocide and all of the other crimes that it is guilty of today.

Considering that less than 4 percent of the world's population are immigrants (living in a country they were not born in), the assumption that one's life chances are independent of one's country of origin is deceptive

The nation and the state depend on each other.

We are all pretty determined people, And like Americans tend to look at the place we live in as not only a place but also an idea we live in.

If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?

As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?

Many people could not understand that the idea of government is not to provide, the way parents provide for a child.

For a while I saw myself as an outcast from an America that had always been mine.

is that we created a government that is doing this to us. It

The US exports democracy, hence there being very little left for Americans

We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.