You are my Avis,” he said, “and you are also some one else. You are two women, and therefore you are my harem. At any rate, we are safe now. If the United States becomes too hot for us, why, I have qualified for citizenship in Turkey.

Our citizenship in the United States is our national character. Our citizenship in any particular state is only our local distinction. By the latter we are known at home, by the former to the world. Our great title is AMERICANS…

There’s no such thing as second class citizenship. That’s like telling me you can be a little bit pregnant.

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.

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!

That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.

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

The company is not and must never claim to be home, family, religion, life or fate for the individual. It must never interfere in his private life or his citizenship. He is tied to the company through a voluntary and cancellable employment contract, not through some mystical or indissoluble bond.

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.

Let us aim for victory in the spring. You in the factories, you in the fields, you in uniforms; you citizens of the world, let us work and fight towards that end. You, official Washington, and you, official London, let us make this our aim – victory in the spring.

The highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is bearing arms.

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman, but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to be, to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they’re not discriminated on the job.

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.