All of this suggests that while citizens became more comfortable with President Bush after September 11 and thought him to have the requisite leadership skills, they continue to harbor doubts about his priorities, loyalties, interests, and policies

Call to mind the sentiments which nature has engraved on the heart of every citizen, and which take a new force when they are solemnly recognized by all:-For a nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it

[Government] is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members.

A government, at bottom, is nothing more than a gang of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men … Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to describe the best as the common enemy of all decent citizens.

There is a duty to improve the lot of others. Charity isn’t personal, it’s public. It’s owed not just to God and salvation but to the nation: the idea that America itself deserves its citizens’ charity, not because it is poor but because it could always be richer.

Every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it.

Among American citizens, there should be no forgotten men and no forgotten races

In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority.

Socrates said he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

I think not just Nigeria but I think the whole of Africa has to turn back to the rural areas and that’s where the majority of the citizens are and that’s where the engine of of development has to be found.

myself as much a citizen of America as anybody else and my great love has always been here in this country […] at the same time I don’t feel I am allied to any one particular country. I feel I am a citizen of the world. I feel that when the day comes when we have the barriers down and so forth so people come and go all around the world and be a part of any country, and I have always felt that about citizenship.

I feel like any other Brazilian citizen, I have a lot of happiness in me. I thank God for showing me the path to follow.

The Tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.

And yet we cannot define as skillful killing one’s fellow citizens, betraying one’s friends, and showing no loyalty, mercy, or moral obligation. These means can lead to power, but not glory.

A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.

Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.

In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.

It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.

The function of a citizen and a soldier are inseparable.

It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.

Citizens are not born, but made.

The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.

One of the great strengths of the United States is… we have a very large Christian population – we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.

Ours is a nation of laws: of citizens who live under them and for the citizens who enforce them. So, to a community in Ferguson that is rightly hurting and looking for answers, let me call once again for us to seek some understanding rather than simply holler at each other. Let’s seek to heal rather than to wound each other.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college – the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes – the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That’s what America is about.

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.