Top 100 Quotes About Citizenship
#1. Citizenship of a democratic state means living by the laws of the country. A liberal democracy cannot survive when part of the population believes that divine laws trump those made by man.
Ian Buruma
#2. 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.
A. Philip Randolph
#3. Citizenship is no light trifle to be jeopardized any moment Congress decides to do so under the name of one of its general or implied grants of power.
Hugo Black
#4. Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.
Frederick Douglass
#5. Are we bereft of citizenship because we are mothers, wives and daughters of a mighty people? Have women no country
no interests staked in public weal
no liabilities in common peril
no partnership in a nation's guilt and shame?
Angelina Grimke
#6. Interest yourself in public affairs as a duty of citizenship, but do not surrender your faith to those who discredit and debase politics by scoffing at sentiment and principle, and whose political activity consists in attempts to gain popular support by cunning devices and shrewd manipulation.
Grover Cleveland
#7. Citizenship should be based on those who have a close and real relationship with this country and its inhabitants.
Margaret Thatcher
#8. From the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship
Amiri Baraka
#9. Arizona is in the midst of a fiscal crisis. We've cut school funding. And they pass a bill questioning Obama's citizenship? For real?
Kyrsten Sinema
#10. There is nothing beyond the reach of ordinary citizens doing the daily work of democracy, and no problem too great to tackle with the power of active citizenship.
Joan Claybrook
#11. We do not support an automatic pathway to citizenship,
Elaine Chao
#12. We [Americans] really need a system that comprehensively looks at the fact that we need these workers in the United States, we need to be able to provide a pathway to citizenship. We need to be able to allow them to be here legally and to do the work that they are doing and that we need.
Pramila Jayapal
#13. 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
#14. Those who have come to the United States illegally should not be given amnesty or an easier path to citizenship over those already in line.
Mitt Romney
#15. From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live; and, as at the instant of birth we partake of the rights of citizenship, that instant ought to be the beginning of the exercise of our duty.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#16. Citizenship is the chance to make a difference to the place where you belong.
Charles Handy
#17. Political citizenship has progressed, while social citizenship has regressed.
Pierre Rosanvallon
#18. France was the first country in Europe to grant Jews the full rights of citizenship without qualification.
Leon Uris
#19. Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient's bed. You don't care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one's previous citizenship at the border.
Paul Monette
#20. I want to declare my Citizenship in the Kingdom of God and my allegiance to His Kingdom and His City!
David Berg
#21. Heavenly citizenship and heavenly homesickness are in prayer. Prayer is an appeal from the lowness, from the emptiness, from the need of earth, to the highness, the fullness and to the all-sufficiency of heaven.
Edward McKendree Bounds
#22. I believe in the admission of women to the full rights of citizenship and share in government, on the express grounds that few women keep house so badly or with such wastefulness as chancellors of the exchequer keep the state.
Theodore Parker
#23. It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.
Julian Baggini
#24. It's a tough path to citizenship. You've got to pay back taxes. You've got to learn English. You've got to have a clear record. You've got to get to the back of the line behind other people who have come here legally or even waiting legally.
John McCain
#25. It is one of the great goals of my administration to invigorate the spirit of involvement and citizenship. We will encourage faith-based and community programs without changing their mission.
George W. Bush
#26. I do not support citizenship for those already here illegally. Those who cut the line and broke our laws as their first act entering this country have foregone that opportunity.
Carly Fiorina
#27. The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.
Winston Churchill
#28. Hillary Clinton made a campaign stop in Las Vegas yesterday. She said she wants citizenship for undocumented immigrants. But after seeing Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo yesterday, immigrants said, 'You know what, we're good. We're gonna head back now. We had enough.'
Jimmy Fallon
#29. Our immigration system is a broken system that needs to be fixed. We need reform that provides hardworking people of good character with a real path towards citizenship.
Joe Baca
#30. It's not the physical location of birth that defines citizenship, but whether your parents are citizens, and the express or implied consent to jurisdiction of the sovereign.
Phyllis Schlafly
#31. The stage is actor's country. You have to get your passport stamped every so often or they take away your citizenship.
Vanessa Redgrave
#32. 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.
Anne Lamott
#33. Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it's an assault on citizenship.
Mark Steyn
#34. Application does not guarantee citizenship; it is granted by the government. In Heaven, citizenship is granted only by Jesus Christ the ultimate judge. Matthew 7:15-23
Felix Wantang
#35. 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
#36. The Know Nothings fought to delay citizenship for the new immigrants and bar them from voting.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#37. Hospitals must provide emergency treatment to all who walk through the door, regardless of their citizenship status or ability to pay.
Gary Miller
#38. 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.
Lucy Powell
#39. Why should citizenship be a matter of birth? The premise held by those who want to end birthright citizenship is that some people deserve it and some do not - that the status shouldn't be handed out automatically. Frankly, that's a premise worth considering.
Eric Liu
#40. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense
is understood NOT as a failure of civil society,
to be mourned,
but as an act of citizenship,
to be vaunted,
there is little civilian life left.
Jill Lepore
#41. There are an awful lot of people who despise government precisely because it opened the door for common citizenship for people of all races and all natures in the United States.
Taylor Branch
#42. We're not going to fix government until we fix citizenship.
Jennifer Pahlka
#43. Birth on U.S. territory has never been an absolute claim to citizenship.
Phyllis Schlafly
#44. A citizenship of wholesale delegation and abdication to public and private power systems, such as prevails now, makes such periodic checks as elections little more than rituals.
Ralph Nader
#45. Why should there not be a European group which could give a sense of enlarged patriotism and common citizenship to the distracted peoples of this turbulent and mighty continent? And why should it not take its rightful place with other great groupings and help to shape the onward destinies of men?
Winston Churchill
#46. If there's amnesty leading to citizenship, I'm going to vote against it again.
Frank Wolf
#47. Experts always know everything but the fine points. When I took my citizenship exams, no one there knew how the White House came to be called the White House.
Hedy Lamarr
#48. Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!
H.G.Wells
#49. Citing both the Buddha and Aristotle, Sachs makes the case for a "middle path," a path of moderation and balance between work and non-work (what he calls, quaintly in this day and age, "leisure"), savings and consumption, self-interest and compassion, individualism and citizenship.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#50. Well I don't know, I might have lost my citizenship, I don't think you can lose your citizenship though.
Tommy Chong
#51. 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
#52. Active citizenship begins with an envisioning of the desired outcome and a conscious application of spiritual principles.
Dennis Kucinich
#53. If the undocumented have to work hard to attain citizenship, those of us who already are citizens should have to work hard to sustain it. We should all have to serve more, vote more, build more, and do more for our country.
Eric Liu
#54. A Christian's citizenship may be in heaven, but he has obligations as a citizen of earth. Both living with Christ and going to be with Him in death are greatly to be desired.
Billy Graham
#55. Planetary Citizenship reveals a vital blueprint for a compassionate and sustainable world. Hazel Henderson and Daisaku Ikeda make a formidable team stepping forward as humanity's guides in this great transition to the next stage of social evolution.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
#56. We are dealing with the question of the 11 million people paying their taxes, having a path to legalization and, then, ultimately, to citizenship - tough issues, but we are coming together and I think we can do it.
Dick Durbin
#57. If 'little George Dubya Bush' wins, we are going to apply for Canadian citizenship.
Eddie Vedder
#58. It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.
William Howard Taft
#59. The time for common-sense immigration reform is now," Grayson said in a news release. "We must set forth a straightforward route to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants who already live in our communities, work for our businesses and want to give back to the country that they call home.
Alan Grayson
#60. There are only three types of citizenship: hero, villain, nobody.
Toba Beta
#61. Education has increasingly been reduced to job training, preparing young people not for responsible adulthood and citizenship but for expert servitude to the corporations.
Wendell Berry
#62. Women have the same privileges and opportunities as men, given the New Testament. Relegating women to second-class citizenship was abolished when Jesus died on the cross.
Tony Campolo
#63. As becomes more obvious every day, good citizenship is highly unpopular.
Kurt Vonnegut
#64. The establishment of the National Park Service is justified by considerations of good administration, of the value of natural beauty as a National asset, and of the effectiveness of outdoor life and recreation in the production of good citizenship.
Theodore Roosevelt
#65. Crucially, I'd like to thank Labour party members up and down the country for sticking with us. For their active citizenship, their willingness to engage in our democracy, and for being there at the cutting edge of making our democracy work.
David Blunkett
#66. For most Americans, our most precious possession is citizenship in this amazing country. That endowment is being bartered away by our elites in exchange for votes, for profits, or for campaign dollars.
Ann Coulter
#67. Even if there's no way to stop U.S. corporations from shedding their U.S. identities and becoming foreign corporations, there's no reason they should retain the privileges of U.S. citizenship.
Robert Reich
#68. Conservatives forget that citizenship is more than a thing to withhold from immigrants. Progressives forget it's more than a set of rights.
Eric Liu
#69. We also have a program in place for low income people. A family of four making $26,000 a year can receive medical coverage, irrespective of citizenship or what documents.
George Pataki
#70. 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.
Plato
#71. Rights of true citizenship accrue only to those who serve the State to which they belong.
Mahatma Gandhi
#72. Is it unreasonable to have proof of citizenship when entering another country?
Gwen Ifill
#73. My ideal picture of citizenship will always be an argument, not a sing-along.
Sarah Vowell
#74. If the money is raised by taxation, then the burden will fall where it ought to fall, ... and the rich and stingy will no longer be able to evade the duties of citizenship and of humanity.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#75. In my opinion, right up there with free public schools, our free public library system is what makes citizenship possible, even what makes America great.
Karen DeCrow
#76. I have never concealed my dual citizenship. People involved in state business should probably declare their dual citizenship if they have it.
Gennady Timchenko
#77. People inside of belonging systems are very threatened by those who are not within that group. They are threatened by anyone who has found their citizenship in places they cannot control.
Richard Rohr
#78. Told reporters Wednesday he can support a pathway to citizenship for some of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. and that he actually prefers it to a plan that would create a second-class of citizens through alternative programs.
Darrell Issa
#79. Commerce has changed the ethics of citizenship and the incentives for national service. America now buys private contractors - we used to call them mercenaries - to do the country's fighting.
Michael Ignatieff
#80. In the midst of wanton aggression, we still call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to return to the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, with full and equal citizenship and due representation in its bodies and institutions - provisional or permanent.
David Ben-Gurion
#81. There's no issue whatsoever. Ted Cruz has dual citizenship, because his mom is a U.S. citizen, so he gets naturalized citizen as a result of that.
Donald Trump
#82. Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it
Martha Gellhorn
#83. I see little difference in the attitudes of those who consider themselves Christian and those who are openly secular and agnostic. Most Christian citizenship appears to be clearly right here - on this little bit of very unreal estate.
Richard Rohr
#84. Without a serious study of journalism, there can be no understanding of citizenship, democracy, or community.
Roy Peter Clark
#85. Christians belong in American politics because there is not and cannot be a fundamental separation between our moral vocation and our citizenship.
Alan Keyes
#87. [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
#88. Full participation in government and society has been a basic right of the country symbolizing the full citizenship and equal protection of all.
Charles B. Rangel
#89. The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant-baptism and holy communion-must be denied citizenship.
Gary North
#90. While other men were peacefully following their vocations and extending their interests they [the Saints in Clay County] have been deprived of the right of citizenship, prevented from enjoying their own, charged with violating the sacred principles of our Constitution and laws.
Joseph Smith Jr.
#91. The cry comes from the friends of the school-room, from those who would give the State a strong, great, noble citizenship, for protection from the curse of drunkenness. This cry should be heard and answered by every lover of his fellow-men, no matter where his home may be.
Thomas Jordan Jarvis
#92. If those who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment had imagined laws restricting immigration - and had anticipated huge waves of illegal immigration - is it reasonable to presume they would have wanted to provide the reward of citizenship to the children of the violators of those laws? Surely not.
George Will
#93. Of all the studies by which men acquire citizenship of the intellectual commonwealth, no single one is so indispensable as the study of the past.
Bertrand Russell
#94. Jordan is the only Arab state that has provided citizenship to Palestinian refugees and integrated them. But something has to be done about the Palestinians living in refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon.
Walter Russell Mead
#95. When business leaders ask me what they can do for Indiana, I always reply: 'Make money. Go make money. That's the first act of corporate citizenship. If you do that, you'll have to hire someone else, and you'll have enough profit to help one of those non-profits we're so proud of.'
Mitch Daniels
#96. Castilian Spanish speaking Spain is big, but is bigger in addition with Catalonian speaking Spain, Galician speaking Spain and Basque speaking Spain. Democratic Spain, Constitutional Spain, can not be separated from diversity and the respect to the citizenship
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero
#97. The rights of citizenship will be taken away from all Jews and other non-Aryans. They are inferior and therefore enemies of the state. It is the duty of all true Aryans to hate and despise them.
Charlie Chaplin
#98. I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited citizenship.
Bharati Mukherjee
#99. On the other hand, the vast majority of all westernized countries, including every single European country along with Israel and Japan, do not offer birthright citizenship.
Nathan Deal
#100. 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.
Earl Warren
