American Citizen Quotes

#1. With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relative, my children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned my commission in the Army ...

Robert E.Lee

#2. In time of this grave national danger, when all excess income should go to win the war, no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#3. Whether we start with a provisional status and legal permanent residence ... or we set up some other way to assimilate legally, you can't ever put in something that says, 'You can never become a citizen.' That's un-American.

Jeff Denham

#4. I was taught from a young age that many people would treat me as a second-class citizen because I was African-American and because I was female.

Queen Latifah

#5. [ISIS] are actively recruiting Americans. The attacker in San Bernardino was an American citizen, born and raised in this country. He was a health inspector; had a newborn child and left all that behind to kill 14 people.

Marco Rubio

#6. I don't profess to be an expert on anything, or have the memory for who ran in 1952. I am an informed American citizen, that's my position.

Joy Behar

#7. There's an old saying in the black community that everybody else is protected and served but we are policed, we don't want to be policed. We want to be protected and served as any American citizen.

Benjamin Crump

#8. Obama's IRS is not the IRS I've ever known for over seventy years as an American citizen.

Michael Moriarty

#9. I have become an American citizen, and I love this country. I think that this country has incredible potential for goodness, an incredible possibility for doing the wrong thing, too.

Isabel Allende

#10. It makes me feel good. Being a foreigner, (the American fans) they make me feel like I'm a citizen of this country.

Sergio Martinez

#11. I don't think that I or any other Negro, as an American citizen, should have to ask for anything that is rightfully his. We are demanding that we just be given the things that are rightfully ours and that we're not looking for anything else.

Jackie Robinson

#12. Mr. Couture is not an American citizen. He is from Montreal. It is a large city, about the size of Boston, in that very large country just north of here. You may have heard of it. They play hockey. -

Sylvain Neuvel

#13. To be a born American citizen seems a guarantee against pauperism; and this, perhaps, springs from the virtue of a vote.

Herman Melville

#14. It takes more than just walking across the border to become an American citizen. It's what's in our souls.

Duncan D. Hunter

#15. Edgar Wayburn has worked to preserve the most breath-taking examples of the American landscape. In fact, over the course of more than a half-century, both as President of the Sierra Club and as a private citizen, he has saved more of our wilderness than any person alive.

William J. Clinton

#16. There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer

Martin Luther King Jr.

#17. But gentlemen, as long as I am an American Citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject.

Elijah Parish Lovejoy

#18. If you're an American citizen and you decide to join up with ISIS, we're not going to read you your rights. You're going to be treated as an enemy combatant, a member of an army attacking this country.

Marco Rubio

#19. We are not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of citizens. I am sick and tired of the American citizen being demeaned and treated as a second-class citizen while anybody who crosses the border is treated as the most virtuous human being on the face of the earth.

Mark Levin

#20. I am an American citizen and feel I am entitled to the same rights as any other citizen.

Nat King Cole

#21. I could not become an American citizen. I would not like to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment.

Werner Herzog

#22. I think it could be the biggest information problem that we face. 'If somebody is abroad and they even mention the name of an American citizen, bang, off goes the tap, and no more information is collected.

Charles Bass

#23. I have come to a resolution myself as I hope every good citizen will, never again to purchase any article of foreign manufacture which can be had of American make, be the difference of price what it may.

Thomas Jefferson

#24. Unfortunately, every American citizen takes the same position that we don't like negative advertisements. But they work! And, as you see, many a candidate has prevailed by tearing down the reputation of an opponent in a more advantageous position.

Jimmy Carter

#25. I don't feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there's a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you're not a national.

Salman Rushdie

#26. As long as I am an American citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject, being amenable to the laws of my country for the same.

Elijah Parish Lovejoy

#27. I speak to you today not as an American citizen and not as a Jew, but as a human being

Albert Einstein

#28. Non-citizen terrorist suspects are not members of the American national community, and they have no proper claim on the rights Americans accord one another.

Richard Perle

#29. It is the duty of every American citizen to take part in a vigorous debate on the issues of the day.

Thomas Jefferson

#30. The seat of the greatest patriotic loyalties is in the stomach. Long after giving up all attachment to the land of his birth, the naturalized American citizen holds fast to the food of his parents.

Vicki Baum

#31. It's been federal law for over two centuries that the child of an American born abroad is a citizen - a natural born citizen.

Ted Cruz

#32. The best American is one who considers themselves as a citizen of the world.

Chuck D

#33. If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then they are to me a curse, and not a blessing.

John Hope

#34. I am an American citizen and it is my home now. I like the U.S.A., which is not a place too many people have liked since Bush. The U.S. has a young population, and everything can change within a year.

Isabel Allende

#35. I use the phrase "fellow citizen" all the time when referring to the - people always say, "The American people, the American people." I prefer the phrase fellow citizen because there's a power in that, there's a responsibility, there's a duty in using that phrase fellow citizen.

Tavis Smiley

#36. I am an Iranian by birth and of my Islamic faith. I am also an American Citizen and I seek to help change America to be a more Islamic country. My faith guides me and I feel like it is going well in the transition of using freedom of religion in America against itself.

Valerie Jarrett

#37. Who gets to decide who's an enemy combatant and who's an American citizen? Are we really so frightened and so easily frightened that we would give up a thousand-year history?

Rand Paul

#38. Let each person do his or her part. If one citizen is unwilling to participate, all of us are going to suffer. For the American idea, though it is shared by all of us, is realized in each one of us.

Barbara Jordan

#39. What is a good enough principle for an American citizen ought to be good enough for the working man to follow.

Mary Harris Jones

#40. You want to defend citizenship? Don't persecute or isolate those without papers. Just live like a citizen. That'd be a first-class way to be American.

Eric Liu

#41. At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and won, and we all of us, living and yet to be born, must be forever profoundly grateful.

Stephen E. Ambrose

#42. Well, what I will tell you is the support from the world - it's not just an African-American citizen. There are people of all different walks of life who are rallying behind the concerns with the that Sandy was treated because what that says to me is that this is an American issue.

Sharon Cooper

#43. We don't have storm troopers that just knock on the door of every American citizen. We don't do that for any crime. But when we have evidence that a particular person has committed a crime, we send law enforcement to apprehend them.

Ted Cruz

#44. I'm an American citizen now, but I will always have Canadian pride.

Harland Williams

#45. He doesn't like my name ... Of course we couldn't all come over on the Mayflower ... But I got here as soon as I could, and I never wanted to go back, because to me it is a great privilege to be an American citizen.

Anton Cermak

#46. The terrorists that attacked us in San Bernardino was an American citizen, born and raised in this country. And I bet you we wish we would have had access to five years of his records so we could see who he was working with.

Marco Rubio

#47. I'm not trying to say stop Donald Trump from being elected as his party's nominee. I'm saying that we have a responsibility to raise our voices, to say what he does as an American citizen is pretty destructive to the practice of goodhearted and conscientious politics.

Michael Eric Dyson

#48. I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.

Eldridge Cleaver

#49. Let me say with a Georgia accent that we cannot solve this problem if it requires a diplomatic passport to claim the rights of an American citizen.

Dean Rusk

#50. I'm obviously an American citizen. My parents are American citizens. But I'm not looked at as an American.

Ana Castillo

#51. Our growing, robust economy is able to provide the average American citizen access to the best social program there is - a steady job.

J. D. Hayworth

#52. Mitt Romney will tell us the hard truths we need to hear to end the debacle of putting the world's greatest care system in the hands of federal bureaucrats and putting those bureaucrats between an American citizen and her doctor.

Chris Christie

#53. We thought I was going to be a great athlete, and we were wrong, and I thought I was going to be a great entertainer, and that wasn't it either. I'm going to be an American Citizen. First class.

Dick Gregory

#54. I am an Israeli-born American citizen.

Guy Oseary

#55. The American system of democracy is founded on the concept that every citizen has the right to vote, to know that their vote is counted, and that the vote is counted accurately.

Barbara Mikulski

#56. To date, every American citizen has nearly $27,000 in public debt riding on our backs.

Paul Gillmor

#57. It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law ... that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.

H.L. Mencken

#58. Do your duty as an American, and as a citizen of the galaxy ... Vote!

George Takei

#59. Everyone in the Middle East pretty much wants to come and be an American citizen, but pretty much everybody is angry with the U. S. foreign policy.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#60. I'm a proud American - becoming a citizen in 1988 was one of the most profoundly moving occasions in my life; I'm a former Texan and a recent Californian.

Abraham Verghese

#61. The freedom I have as a U.S. citizen is unparalleled. Despite the fact people may not like American passports, having that passport affords me more freedoms than any other passport could.

Chris Cornell

#62. 1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen.

Tom Brokaw

#63. You may be sure that in this new international system, the American citizen will count for precious little.

Pat Buchanan

#64. We're just trying to figure out what being a good citizen is, what participating in a democracy is, what taking responsibility for being an American citizen in a global context means to us.

Cecily McMillan

#65. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service.

Ida B. Wells

#66. I am an American citizen born in Kuwait of Egyptian parents. I grew up in Great Britain, Malaysia, and Egypt and have lived in the United States since 1965, when I was seventeen.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

#67. Citizen service is the very American idea that we meet our challenges not as isolated individuals but as members of a true community, with all of us working together. Our mission is nothing less than to spark a renewed sense of obligation, a new sense of duty, a new season of service ...

William J. Clinton

#68. Every fascist state like Germany, France, or modern Poland takes away citizen's right to self-defense. Fascist Americans such as Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton want to take arms away from American society.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke

#69. The newspaper has debauched the American until he is a slavish, simpering, and angerless citizen; it has taught him to be a lump mass-man toward fraud, simony, murder, and lunacies more vile than those of Commodus or Caracalla.

Edward Dahlberg

#70. While in medical school, I was drafted into the U.S. Army with the other medical students as part of the wartime training program, and naturalized American citizen in 1943. I greatly enjoyed my medical studies, which at the Medical College of Virginia were very clinically oriented.

Baruj Benacerraf

#71. Finding the Russian scientists may be a problem being that Russia does not have a Social Security System, as here in America, that allows us to monitor, track down and capture an American citizen.

Colin Powell

#72. My library card. Every hurdle I've faced, I have researched my way over at a library. I'm grateful for that part of the American spirit that believes every citizen should have access to books.

Sarah Bird

#73. To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against the liberty of conscience, which is one of the foundations of American life.

Theodore Roosevelt

#74. To become an American citizen, we require people to read, write and speak in English. That is to help them to assimilate in our melting pot, truly to become Americans. We mock that when the cherished right to vote does not involve English any more.

Ernest Istook

#75. I am proud to be an American Citizen.

Robert Purvis

#76. I was determined not to become an American citizen but I did it for completely cynical reasons: to avoid paying inheritance tax in the U.S.

Emily Mortimer

#77. This is emphatically an age of discoveries; but I will venture the assertion, that none but an American slaveholder could have discovered that a man born in a country was not a citizen of it.

William Wells Brown

#78. The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.
- pg. 41

William S. Burroughs

#79. There are some rights that are so fundamental to our society that you'd think the public debate would be closed on them. The right of every American citizen to vote - regardless of age, race, or income level - is one of them.

Martin O'Malley

#80. People were floored when they saw that the underwear bomber, after less than 50 minutes of interrogation, was given the rights, privileges, and immunities of an American citizen under the Constitution.

Michele Bachmann

#81. The right of private judgment is absolute in every American citizen.

James A. Garfield

#82. As an American citizen, I'm not asking for any special treatment - the only thing I ask and want is to be treated just like an Illegal Alien.

Howie Carr

#83. Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right. There is no duty which weighs more heavily on us than the duty we have
to ensure that right.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#84. In the first century A.D., Pliny estimated that the average Roman citizen consumed only 25 grams of salt a day. The modern American consumes even less if the salt content of packaged food is not included.

Mark Kurlansky

#85. To the American people I say, awaken to what is happening. It is the duty of each citizen to be vigilant, to protect liberty, to speak out, left and right and disagree lest be trampled underfoot by misguided zealotry and extreme partisanship.

Robert Byrd

#86. Rather than waiting for future trials to determine rules that will impact every citizen, Congress should step in and write a law that takes every American's rights into consideration.

Ron Wyden

#87. I'm first and foremost an Irishman, by birth, by nature, by soul, but an American citizen through and through as well.

Pierce Brosnan

#88. Forget the accent, I'm a fucking American citizen, you arseholes - I know my rights. If you're going to start talking about getting violent, get a fucking cop or lawyer in here.

Christina Lauren

#89. A lot of people are deeply dissatisfied by the diminishing control they have over their lives, because of the way our system of government is set up, to cater to the powerful, cater to the wealthy, cater to the corporations, and not to the individual American citizen.

Josh Fox

#90. And we are in a strange conundrum. You can kill an American citizen overseas. But according to this administration, if you capture him in the United States, they've got to be read their Miranda rights.

John McCain

#91. As a legal matter, my mother is an American citizen by birth.

Ted Cruz

#92. Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

Pauline Kael

#93. The American citizen must be made aware that today a relatively small group of people is proclaiming its purposes to be the will of the People. That elitist approach to government must be repudiated.

William E. Simon

#94. I might have lived in England for the last several years, but I'm still an American citizen and I have not given up my right to privacy.

Kevin Spacey

#95. I did become American citizen in order to vote. I lived in this country for a very long time and I finally reached the point where I thought, I'm often sticking my neck out on various issues as all human beings have a right to do.

Lynn Redgrave

#96. He struck a mighty blow for equality, freedom and the American way of life. Jackie Robinson was a good citizen, a great man, and a true American champion.

Ronald Reagan

#97. Honestly, I want to live a calm life without being in the press. I want to be like any other American citizen who gets a speeding ticket or has an argument with his spouse ... and doesn't have the whole world know.

George Zimmerman

#98. For instance, I love the movie Casablanca. Who doesn't? No matter how many egghead critics declare Citizen Kane to be the greatest American movie, we all know it's Casablanca in fact.

Andrew Klavan

#99. The typical American citizen is the business man. The typical business man is a bad citizen; he is busy. If he is a 'big business man' and very busy, he does not neglect; he is busy with politics, oh, very busy and very businesslike.

Lincoln Steffens

#100. More than one-third of Mexicans in the United States own property in Mexico, nearly 80 percent send money home and 25 percent have a spouse in Mexico. Assimilation and becoming an American citizen are not the objective for many of them.

John Shadegg