Quotes & Sayings About Being An American Citizen

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

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

1987: "We cannot assume that young people today know things that were known in the past by almost every literate person in the culture." Hirsch has argued that students are being sent out into the world without the basic level of cultural literacy that is necessary to be a good citizen (what does it say that two thirds of American seventeen-year-olds can't even tell you within fifty years when the Civil War occurred?), and what's needed is a kind of educational counterreformation that reemphasizes hard facts. — Joshua Foer

If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription, who has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer - even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American or Mexican-American family being rounded up by John Ashcroft without benefit of an attorney or due process, I know that that threatens my civil liberties. And I don't have to be a woman to be concerned that the Supreme Court is trying to take away a woman's right, because I know that my rights are next. It is that fundamental belief - I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper - that makes this country work. — Barack Obama

Friends have asked how I came to engender this American antagonism. My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them. Secondly, I was opposed to the Committee on Un-American Activities - a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority of one. — Charlie Chaplin

Taking privacy cues from the federal government is - to say the least - ironic, considering today's Orwellian level of surveillance. At virtually any given time outside of one's own home, an American citizen can reasonably assume his movements and actions are being monitored by something, by somebody, somewhere. — Bob Barr

When I care about something, I care about something. I think I have an obligation as an American to - and as a citizen, as - as a human being, to help others. Smoking is going to kill a billion people this century. I've put six hundred million dollars from my own money into trying to stop the tobacco companies from getting kids to smoke and convincing adults that it's not in their health. — Michael Bloomberg

I speak to you today not as an American citizen and not as a Jew, but as a human being — Albert Einstein

But ultimately, sovereign power really is, still, the right to brush such legalities aside, or to make them up as one goes along.164 The United States might call itself "a country of laws, not men," but as we have learned in recent years, American presidents can order torture, assassinations, domestic surveillance programs, even set up extra-legal zones like Guantanamo where they can treat prisoners pretty much any way they choose to. Even on the lowest levels, those who enforce the law are not really subject to it. It's extraordinary difficult, for instance, for a police officer to do anything to an American citizen that would lead to that officer being convicted of a crime.165 — David Graeber

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I do not find that I feel myself to be any different as an English subject than as an American. I have not the vote in either place, so I am not a citizen of either, and have no call to be patriotic. In fact, I do not see how women can ever feel like anything but aliens in whatever country they may live, for they have no part or lot in any, except the part and lot of being taxed and legislated for by men. — Hannah Whitall Smith

A citizen of the United States, means a member of this new nation. The principle of government being radically changed by the revolution, the political character of the people was also changed from subjects to citizens.
The difference is immense. Subject is derived from the latin word 'sub' and 'jacio', and means one who is under the power of another; but a citizen is an unit of mass of free people, who, collectively, possess sovereignty .
Subjects look up to a master, but citizens are so far equal, that none have hereditary rights superior to others. Each citizen of a free state contains, within himself, by nature and constitution, as much of the common sovereignty as another. In the eye of reason and philosophy, the political condition of citizens is more exalted than that of noblemen. Dukes and earls are the features of kings, and may be made by them at pleasure; but citizens possess in their own right original sovereignty. — David Ramsay

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

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

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

I try to associate myself as just being myself - and being a person, an American citizen, going out there every day and just trying to be successful. — Robert Griffin III

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

I never favored any political party. Being a conservative or a liberal, a Republican or a Democrat, these are just labels that people use to categorize each other so that they can quickly decide whether or not they want to listen to what they have to say. Politicians are not interested in empathizing with each other. They simply try to do as little as possible in the way of serving the public while building their reputation among their peers, amassing power and wealth that is unimaginable to the common American citizen that they supposedly represent. — Aaron B. Powell

It was a failure of citizenship of the American people that the Bush cabal was allowed to invade Iraq. Thus, every U.S. citizen who is not doing everything in their power to end this illegal and immoral occupation as quickly as possible is complicit with the war crimes being committed in Iraq on a daily basis. — Dahr Jamail

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