Best Citizenship Quotes

Good citizenship and defending democracy means living up to the ideals and values that make this country great.

A republic is not an easy form of government to live under, and when the responsibility of citizenship is evaded, democracy decays and authoritarianism takes over.

But simply someone who broke the law, came here, say, ‘I’ll give you citizenship now,’ that I don’t think is going to happen.

Writing is how I communicate my deepest beliefs, and what I hope are helpful observations about our dual citizenship, as children of God, as regular old mixed-up, worried, flawed, precious human beings.

Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group…devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.

You wouldn’t replace your carpet at home if you still had a hole in the roof…We’re talking about any time you start waving a carrot such as American citizenship without securing the borders, that number [of undocumented immigrants] that we have today I believe will double or triple.

When human statecraft attaches a chain to the feet of a free man, whom it makes a slave in contempt of nature and citizenship, eternal justice rivets the other end about the tyrant’s neck.

I think the arts has great potential to create citizens. Citizenship is about the direction your imagination travels. We can’t plan or calculate or examine citizenship; it’s an imagined thing. Community is an imagined thing. And if your imagination isn’t working – and, of course, in oppressed people that’s the first thing that goes – you can’t imagine anything better. Once you can imagine something different, something better, then you’re on your way.

What I have desired to do is to make the people of Boston realize that the most important office, and the one which all of us can and should fill, is that of private citizen.

At its most basic the democratic contract is a simple one: the right to vote comes with a responsibility to society, through tax payments and citizenship.

From a policy point of view, I don’t think it’s the right approach. I don’t like the idea of having millions of people here for their entire life without being able to assimilate into America…From a political point of view, we’ve got 55 Democrats sent and a 72 percent support for a path to citizenship. It’s just not practical to think we’ll be able to pass any bill in the United States Senate without a path to citizenship.

For everybody has a natural right not only to defend his own person and property against aggressors, but also to go to the assistance and defence of everybody else, whose person or property is invaded. The natural right of each individual to defend his own person and property against an aggressor, and to go to the assistance and defence of every one else whose person or property is invaded, is a right without which men could not exist on earth.

I will argue until my last breath for a pathway to citizenship that is quick and efficient because I want to end this chapter. I want to end it…But let me say, conversely, I am as committed as any Republican to ending illegal immigration as we know it…They want to end it. So do I.

We’re being overrun by people who live in poor and corrupt countries who come to the USA to get work. But we got to regain our sovereignty, we’re going to control our border, and there will be border security tied to the pathway to citizenship. There will be an earned pathway to citizenship. It will be available to everybody who works hard, pays a fine, passes a background check.

Certainly I’m participating in an already established and awesome tradition, but it’s a tradition that sort of shoots up and through the mainstream in short bursts and pulses and then gets diluted. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson shot up and then got sucked back down underground under more entertaining and less radical versions of body and self – poetry and prose that posited bodies in more perfect union with good citizenship.

Applied good taste is a mark of good citizenship. Ugliness is a from of anarchy.. ugly cities, ugly advertising, ugly lives produce bad citizens.

Although an increasing proportion of the Hispanic population is foreign-born – about half of adults in this group – English proficiency is and should remain a requirement for citizenship.

The only title in our democracy superior to that of President is the title of citizen.

There will never be a bill without a pathway to citizenship signed by the president…And in turn there will never be a pathway to citizenship without a new immigration system replacing the current one.

As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.

Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace.

Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.

We want the full works of citizenship with no reservations. We will accept nothing less . . . This condition of freedom, equality, and democracy is not the gift of gods. It is the task of men, yes, men, brave men, honest men, determined men.

Zionism is an abominable, racist and colonial movement. Like all colonial and apartheid systems, it’s in the interest of all that it be swept away. My hope is to see it replaced, without any bloodshed, with a democratic, secular and lay state – for example on the borders of historic Palestine – and where Palestinians and Israelis could live under equal rights of citizenship without ethnic and religious discrimination. It’s a wish that I hope will soon become a reality.

Getting my library card was like citizenship; it was like American citizenship.

It must be a good thing to die conscious of having performed some real good, and to know that by this work one will live, at least in the memory of some, and will have left a good example to those that come after. A work that is good-it may not be eternal, but the thought expressed in it is, and the work itself will certainly remain in existence for a long, long time; and if afterwards others arise, they can do no better than follow in the footsteps of such predecessors and do their work in the same way.

Birth on U.S. territory has never been an absolute claim to citizenship.

Selflessness. Humility. Truthfulness. These are the three marks of an honorable man.

Becoming a resident of a state may confer the right to get a driver’s license, but it does not and should not confer citizenship.

And the passiveness, you know, the apathy, well, that’s not responsible citizenship. When I’m asked, why am I an activist, I say, well that’s the rent that I pay for living on this planet, okay?

The only way we can keep our freedom is to work at it. Not some of us. All of us. Not some of the time, but all of the time. So if you value your citizenship and you want to keep it for yourself and your children and their children, give it your faith, your belief, and give it your active support in civic affairs.

In a world of inhumanity, war and terrorism, American citizenship is a very precious possession.

And a democracy, I suppose, comes into being when the poor, winning the victory, put to death some of the other party, drive out others, and grant the rest of the citizens an equal share in both citizenship and offices.

What makes America special is that people come here, assimilate and become American with all of the rights and responsibilities citizenship bestows.

Since the days of Greece and Rome the word ‘citizen’ was a title of honor. We have often seen more emphasis put on the rights of citizenship than on its responsibilities.