Quotes About American Citizenship

#1. Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship.

Sarah Vowell

#2. In the midst of applying for American citizenship, of finally attempting to get my presidents in a row, I felt it incumbent upon myself to explore the national psyche in every way.

Hamish Bowles

#3. Millions of us, myself included, go back generations in this country, with ancestors who put in the painstaking work to become citizens. So we don't like the notion that anyone might get a free pass to American citizenship.

Barack Obama

#4. The desire from those abroad to join our ranks is overwhelming. Tens of millions have applied for the limited amount of diversity visas available every year, illustrating the demand and need to maintain this vital path to American citizenship.

Cedric Richmond

#5. 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.

Lou Barletta

#6. [American Citizenship] captures the enduring idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations

Barack Obama

#7. I shall accord to myself the honor of inscribing myself as an applicant for the American citizenship which according to law I can obtain only after five years residence in this country. And I shall yield to no one of my future countrymen in patriotism. I consider America now my real home.

Wilhelm Steinitz

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

Phyllis Schlafly

#9. Those who take their money abroad in an effort to avoid paying American taxes should lose their American citizenship.

Robert Reich

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

Oprah Winfrey

#11. And we should be a welcoming nation. Our identity is not based on race or ethnicity, it's based on a set of shared values. That's American citizenship.

Jeb Bush

#12. One of the reasons I decided to apply for American citizenship after something like a quarter of century of living here on a British, European Union passport and a green card, was my identification with the United States in the post-September 11th period.

Christopher Hitchens

#13. A massive new guest worker program hurts American workers ... If a guest worker program were to provide a path to citizenship, we would be rewarding lawbreakers with the greatest honor our country can bestow - citizenship.

Lamar S. Smith

#14. Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or our tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region.

William Fulton

#15. In his book The Soul of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois writes about always feeling his twoness
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; to warring ideals in one dark body.

Ron Suskind

#16. I'm not American. I still have my Japanese citizenship.

Masi Oka

#17. Christians belong in American politics because there is not and cannot be a fundamental separation between our moral vocation and our citizenship.

Alan Keyes

#18. In America, to be ID'd - sorted, tagged, and permanently filed - is to lose a bit of one's soul. To die a little. This sounds like a subtle, poetic notion. It's not. In American legal and cultural tradition, one essential privilege of citizenship is not having to prove it on demand.

Walter Kirn

#19. Republicans and Democrats are obsessed with making sure that illegal aliens are granted citizenship. The American people are not. They're concerned about jobs, the economy, debt. They're concerned about a plundering country. They're concerned about a decaying, dying country.

Rush Limbaugh

#20. Citizenship to me is more than a piece of paper. Citizenship is also about character. I am an American. We're just waiting for our country to recognize it.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#21. The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.

Jackie Robinson

#22. I was born in the U.S. Why should anyone who has an unfavorable view of the American government renounce his or her citizenship? Why don't its supporters relinquish their citizenship first?

Mohammad Marandi

#23. The laws should be rigidly enforced which prohibit the immigration of a servile class to compete with American labor, with no intention of acquiring citizenship, and bringing with them and retaining habits and customs repugnant to our civilization.

Grover Cleveland

#24. Over the years, dozens of American companies have filed papers to trade in their U.S. corporate citizenship for citizenship in tax haven countries like Bermuda.

Richard Neal

#25. Quite frankly, I think if a man or a woman likes their American job, wherever they were born, they should be able to keep that job. We need a clear path to citizenship for workers who are already here and a fair and efficient on-ramp for those who want to come here.

Aaron Schock

#26. 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

#27. As long as I live, I will never forget that day 21 years ago when I raised my hand and took the oath of citizenship. Do you know how proud I was? I was so proud that I walked around with an American flag around my shoulders all day long.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#28. As a newcomer to America who learned to 'speak American' by watching movies, I firmly believe that to change the politics of immigration and citizenship, we must change culture - the way we portray undocumented people like me and our role in society.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#29. If somebody's going to earn citizenship, with whatever other hurdles are put in the way, at the end of the road they should be able to speak English, they should be able to read English, they should have some knowledge of American history,

Rudy Giuliani

#30. I'm not a Communist. I'm an American. I'm a capitalist. I mean, I'm not a very good capitalist, myself. I'm not very good at it, but it's not that I'm not for capitalism. But people who believe in things like corporate citizenship, it's idiotic. I mean, it shows you're an idiot.

Fran Lebowitz

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

Zoe Lofgren

#32. I didn't flee a dictator or swim an ocean to be an American like some do. I just thought long and hard about it.

Craig Ferguson

#33. Have you ever watched someone become American? Last week, at a national citizenship conference I organize, thirty immigrants from 17 countries swore an oath and became citizens of the United States. It was a stirring experience for the hundreds of people in the room.

Eric Liu