Quotes about Citizenship

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.      My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

You can't take 11 [million people ] at one time and just say, boom, you're gone.

Politics is a waste of time.

And the first thing we have to do is vote. Hey, no, not just once in a while. Not just when my husband or somebody you like is on the ballot. But in every election at every level, all of the time.

In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character.

How often have the frustrations of second-class citizenship and humiliating status led us into blind outrage against each other and the real cause and course of our dilemma been ignored?

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

Even where the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference to this obligation of citizenship. In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.

It seems to me that this is the method that must guide the actions of the Negro in the present crisis in race relations. Through nonviolent resistance the Negro will be able to rise to the noble height of opposing the unjust system while loving the perpetrators of the system. The Negro must work passionately and unrelentingly for full stature as a citizen, but he must not use inferior methods to gain it. He must never come to terms with falsehood, malice, hate, or destruction.

All I want is the same thing you want. To have a nation with a government that is as good and honest and decent and competent and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people.

As President Truman put it, "Being an American is more than a matter of where you or your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal".