40 Citizens Quotes

While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.

Every good citizen makes his country's honor his own, and cherishes it not only as precious but as sacred. He is willing to risk his life in its defense and its conscious that he gains protection while he gives it.

The revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.

I want to see us build a country that is at ease with itself, a country that is confident and a country that is able and willing to build a better quality of life for all its citizens.

Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil.

'The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted.'

Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

From the time of the Revolutionary War, when citizens stood forward to defend their liberties against the depredations of tyranny, all the way through Civil War, through the great World Wars, this nation has been defended by the tradition of common ordinary folks who come from behind the plow, come from the store-clerking, come from the classrooms to get on the battlefields--ordinary citizens turned into heroes in defense of their liberty, because that's the potential of freedom.

The gun control mentality is ruthlessly absurd. It suggests that you pass a law which will bind law-abiding citizens--they won't have access to weapons. Now, we know that criminals, by definition, are people who don't obey laws. Therefore, you can pass all the laws that you want, they will still have access to these weapons, just as they have access to illegal drugs and other things right now. That means you end up with a situation in which the law-abiding folks can't defend themselves, and the crooks have all the guns.

'We the people' tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. 'We the people' are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which 'We the people' tell the government what it is allowed to do. 'We the people' are free.

Why are so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissue? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

Eliza and I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United States of America ... We argued that is was as good a scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves - and yet it prescribed no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong. We said it was possible that the framers of the Constitution were blind to the beauty of persons who were without great wealth or powerful friends or public office, but who were nonetheless genuinely strong. We thought it was more likely, though, that their framers had not noticed that it was natural, and therefore almost inevitable, that human beings in extraordinary and enduring situations should think of themselves of composing new families. Eliza and I pointed out that this happened no less in democracies than in tyrannies, since human beings were the same the wide world over, and civilized only yesterday. Elected representatives, hence, could be expected to become members of the famous and powerful family of elected representatives - which would, perfectly naturally, make them wary and squeamish and stingy with respect to all the other sorts of families which, again, perfectly naturally, subdivided mankind. Elize and I ... proposed that the Constitution be amended so as to guarantee that every citizen, no matter how humble, or crazy or incompetent or deformed, somehow be given membership in some family as covertly xenophobic and crafty as the one their public servants formed.

I doubt that even if this evidence could be upgraded to 100 per cent it would persuade the sort of people who go on self-appointed missions of mediation to Baghdad. These people further fail to see that governments now have a further responsibility to their citizens - namely to see that something is done to prevent future assaults on civilisation.

The brave and clear platform adopted by this convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.

As a nation we must prevent hunger and cold to those of our people who are in honest difficulties.

Fellow-citizens: Clouds and darkness are around Him; His pavilion is dark waters and thick clouds; justice and judgment are the establishment of His throne; mercy and truth shall go before His face! Fellow citizens! God reigns and the Government at Washington lives.

Truscott: You're fucking nicked, my old beauty. You've found to your cost that the standards of the British police force are as high as ever. McLeavy: What am I charged with? Truscott: That needn't concern you for the moment. We'll fill in the details later. McLeavy: You can't do this. I've always been a law-abiding citizen. The police are for the protection of ordinary people. Truscott: I don't know where you pick up these slogans, sir. You must read them on hoardings.

This is a citizenry which is annoyed, confused, insulted, and uncertain of how to protect the structures of the public good they struggled so long to put in place. Abruptly the national elites seem to prefer playing another game in which the public good is subjected to what they say are larger truths. All of these turn out to be either pedantically utilitarian or highly romantic. The utilitarian involves the reduction of society to self-interest. The romantic involves the selling of economic mythology as a new universal religion.

The citizenry insist and insist and insist that they are proud of the Medicare system and that they want it to work. They continually send instructions to this effect to their governments. They do so in every imaginable way. And yet, day by day, the governments and the bureaucracies chip away at the system as if in the hope that, by opening holes in it and creating a new ineffectiveness, the citizenry will drop their commitment to it.

Ever since the democratic systems permitted their various courts to give corporations the status of persons, the individual as citizen has been on the defensive. How could it be otherwise? If you are a person before the law and Exxon or Ford is also a person, it is clear that the concept of democratic legitimacy lying with the individual has been mortally wounded.

'As leaders of our respective countries, we are faced with the same challenge of forging greater unity and cohesiveness in our diverse societies, and I share your view that this requires leadership committed to the welfare and interests of all citizens and communities.'

How did we ever get to be an empire? The writings of Noam Chomsky -- America's most useful citizen, in my opinion -- are the best answer to that question. --Boston Globe, April 25, 2004 [190]

One-half of the people of this nation to-day are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one.

If a multiracial citizen's coalition were in place, it would have the muscle to pressure national public officials to consider seriously the interests of ordinary citizens when such issues are debated.

We may blunder on in spite of repeated miscalculations of the popular will. More penetrating and pernicious is the influence our ill-devised machinery has upon the character of our national life. It eats in and into it. It degrades candidates and electors alike. It does its worst to reduce to sterility of influence many of the best of the component elements of the people. The individuals survive, but with their political activity dead or dying, no opportunities of life and growth being afforded them. Finally it presents as an embodiment of the nation an assembly or assemblies into which none can enter who have not been clipped, and pared, and trimmed, and stretched out of natural shape and likeness to slip along the grooves of supply. A free press, free pulpits, and a free people outside help to correct what would otherwise become intolerable but press, pulpits and people, free as they are, work and live in strict limits of relation to the machinery established among them. The world revolves on its axis subject to the Constitution of the United States, and the most Radical newspaper man in London, if such there be, never lets his imagination range out of hearing of the Clock Tower.

If circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist.

With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs.

I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

As I look into the faces that fill this familiar room, and as I imagine those faces in other rooms across the land, I do not see members of the legislative branch or the executive branch or the judicial branch, though I am very much aware of the importance of keeping the separate but coequal branches of our Federal Government in balance. I do not see Senators or Representatives, nor do I see Republicans or Democrats, vital as the two-party system is to sustain freedom and responsible government. At this moment of visible and living unity, I see only Americans. I see Americans who love their country, Americans who work and sacrifice for their country and their children. I see Americans who pray without ceasing for peace among all nations and for harmony at home.

The American people want a dialogue between them and their president . . . And if we can't have that opportunity of talking with one another, seeing one another, shaking hands with one another, something has gone wrong in our society.

A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence, the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves.

It's insane. It's extreme. It's controlled by political interests. It has no justification in the traditional values that justify legal regulation. And we've done nothing about it. We're bigger than they are. We've got rights on our side. And we've done nothing about it. We let them control this debate. Here's the refrain that leads to this: They win because we've done nothing to stop it.

Experience proves that armies are not always sufficient to save a nation; while a nation defended by its people is ever invincible.

Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace.

Many people hardly ever see a politician as a person anymore. Instead, a politician is a shadow they watch on television, not knowing whether he is speaking impromptu or reading a text written for him by anonymous advisers or experts from a screen hidden behind the cameras. Citizens no longer perceive their politician as a living human being, for they never have and will never see him that way. They see only his image, created for them by TV, radio and newspaper commentators.