Best 124 quotes in «citizenship quotes» category

When merit has been achieved, do not take it to yourself; for if you do not take it to yourself, it shall never be taken from you.

Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself

When somebody has dual citizenship and commits a crime, his Dutch passport should be revoked and he should be deported to the other country, even if he was born here.

A champion, he said, wins a World Series or an Olympic and is hoisted on the shoulders of teammates and fans. A hero carries the people on his shoulders. Champions live for the moment- heroes, like Jackie Robinson, transcend time.

An act of charity by the citizens questions the worthiness of the government.

A moral economy is either a moral enterprise that is guided by a genuine spiritual desire to create one, even at the expense of strictly economic considerations, or it will degenerate into another profit-oriented and exploitative use of resources. Citizens who are not prepared to pay higher prices to support such an economy and volunteer their own efforts on its behalf are not likely to be prepared for self-governance in any form. Hence the need for a new municipal politics to become an intensely educational and participatory experience at every level of civic life.

Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship. So when my friends Joel and Stephen and I play hooky from our jobs in the middle of the afternoon to play Pop-A-Shot in a room full of children, I like to think we are not procrastinators; we are patriots pursuing happiness.

Corruption begins at home and can end at home.

Democracy gives us citizens a measure of political power. That power comes with a responsibility to foster a culture that makes it possible to live and work well together for the well-being of all.

Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes.

Encouraging Robert E. Lee to take a job as college president, "You might be presenting to the world in such a position an example of quiet usefulness and gentle patriotism.

Did you know that honey bees came over with the Pilgrims? They are not recognized as citizens but corporations are!

Every nation must have prayerful men and women to intercede for the country’s well-being.

Everyone who receives protection from the society owes a return for the benefit.

[F]reedom isn't free. It shouldn't be a bragging point that "Oh, I don't get involved in politics," as if that makes you somehow cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn't insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable.

Change can only take place if we desire the change.

Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.

In democracies where the citizens may read, hear or say what they like, the leaders are no better and no worse than the followers. So perhaps, if we cannot blame the leaders because the job of peacemaking is a sorry mess, we can only blame ourselves.

If there is any society where the leaders lack the knowledge and the importance of justice, then oppression will be a common neighbor of the citizens.

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.

In the wake of the Patriot Act, during the second administration of George W., you made a series of small, handheld weapons. The rule was that each weapon had to be assembled from household items within minutes. You’d been gay-bashed before, two black eyes while waiting in line for a burrito (you ran after him, of course). Now you thought, if the government comes for its citizens, we should be prepared, even if our weapons are pathetic. Your art-weapons included a steak knife affixed to a bottle of ranch dressing and mounted on an axe handle, a dirty sock sprouting nails, a wooden stump with a clump of urethane resin stuck to one end with dull bolts protruding from it, and more.

It is a duty of every citizen to pray for those who are authority and the nation; so that each one of us may live a peaceful and quiet lives in sacredness.

It is a tragedy, at rate at which EBOLA VIRUS is spreading in West Africa. It is a fatal disease in the history of the world. Intensive education (formal and informal approaches) of the citizens of African can help prevent the spread. International cooperation is urgently needed to combat the EBOLA virus.

It is particularly important to note that, in a democracy, education has never been concerned only with supplying the needs of the economy or ensuring effective socialisation; it also has strong traditions of preparing for citizenship, extending possibilities for learning and promoting social progress.

It is a mistake to tell students that their classroom is a democracy- it cannot and never will be. But children need to learn how to participate in a community and to prepare themselves for democratic citizenship.

It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries--we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie? ... Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.

I have finally learned that I am as much a part of this country as those villagers. Whether they like it or not, my umbilical cord is buried in the earth of Vietnam just like theirs.

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.

It makes me wonder what belonging to a place means. Charles died a Russian in Paris. Viktor called it wrong and was a Russian in Vienna for fifty years, then Austrian, then a citizen of the Reich, and then stateless. Elisabeth kept Dutch citizenship in England for fifty years. And Iggie was Austrian, then American, then an Austrian living in Japan. You assimilate, but you need somewhere else to go. You keep your passport to hand. You keep something private.

Nationalism always preserved this initial intimate loyalty to the government and never quite lost its function of preserving a precarious balance between nation and state on one hand, between the nationals of an atomized society on the other. Native citizens of a nation-state frequently looked down upon naturalized citizens, those who had received their rights by law and not by birth, from the state and not from the nation....

Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free.

Live for your country, die to yourself; live for yourself, die to your country.

Reject anything advice, which does not lead to your personal progress.

The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.

The Angel (in Joshua) declared that he was born leader and indicated that he was in the army of the Lord. The Lord was the commander of that angel, and he is our commander still. We favor no human on either side of any argument.

The Prussian monarchy is not a country which has an army, but an army which has a country in which – as it were – it is just stationed.

The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight.

The recognition that modern societies are no longer monolithic, that the imaginary social space has mushroomed into a multitude of identities has propelled us into a realization that we are in an era where interculturality, transculturalism and the eventual prospect of identifying a cosmopolitan citizenship can become a reality. However we still remain circumscribed by our Little Italies, our China Towns etc., which beyond the pleasures of experiencing culinary delights, nevertheless create a self illusion that we have attained a level of cultural awareness of the other.

Un citoyen ignoré par l'administration est, d'une certaine façon, voué à la non-existence. Il ne faut toutefois pas ignorer qu'une personne privée de ses droits n'a nul devoir à accomplir.

We are forever lured by the sirens of the dogmatic mind, with its haughty complacency, which determines that one´s relationship to others is only meaningful when one tries to convince them of one´s single truth. In such a spiritual and intellectual climate, holding a dialogue consists of speaking, but never of listening - the other is the privileged scope of my proselytism. My truth thus becomes a blind and blinding passion - it imprisons me, even as it was supposed to liberate me; it has become a source of alienation.

We are not born to accommodate tyranny over our hearts, minds, bodies, or souls. We are here to confirm an abundance of love-inspired possibilities greater than such restrictions.

We'd do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn't defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.

When a civil servant or politician acts out of self-interest, it's called corruption, but when a citizen does it, it's called public interest.

When a nation's people willingly or unwillingly make a mistake and give authority of their lives in the hands of a leader who represents neither hope nor humanity, instead keeps thriving on and indeed advocating for, the primitive elements of human character, it becomes the utmost civilized responsibility of those very people to either make a true leader out of him if possible, or dethrone him for good.

The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the ‘me’. When I was a young girl we were called citizens – American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did – consume. Now they don’t use those words any more – it’s the American taxpayer and those are different attitudes.

The rate spread of EBOLA VIRUS in West Africa, is big tragedy. It is a fatal disease in the history of the world. Intensive education (formal and informal approaches) of the citizens of African can help prevent the spread. International cooperation is urgently needed to combat the EBOLA virus.

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing....

[T]he success of democracy depends, in the end, on the reliability of the judgments we citizens make, and hence upon our capacity and determination to weigh arguments and evidence rationally.

The work of an intellectual is not to form the political will of others; it is, through the analyses he does in his own domains, to bring assumptions and things taken for granted again into question, to shake habits, ways of acting and thinking, to dispel the familiarity of the accepted, to take the measure of rules and institutions and, starting from that re-problemitisation (where he plays his specific role as intellectual) to take part in the formation of a political will (where he has his role to play as citizen).

This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122)