Renouncing Us Citizenship Quotes

Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a shallow and inane optimism. I don't believe that man will turn this earth into a bed of roses either with the aid of God or without it. Nor does life among the roses strike me as a dream from which one would not care to wake up after a very short time. ~ Walter Kaufmann

As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship? ~ David Ogilvy

It is clear that the left is winning the battle of ideas with America's young people, and doing so with some decidedly mediocre political dogma. If our children are both demonstrably uneducated and measurably indoctrinated, and if we're fully aware that these things are true, we can't just stand around clucking and griping about all that is wrong. We need to offer more of what is right.
If we want our children to experience the liberty and opportunity uniquely available to us as American citizens, we need to raise a new generation of leaders who will shore up the republican form of government handed down to us by our Founders. We need to counter the Left's messages about dependency and entitlement with a vision of patriotic citizenship to which our youth can aspire. ~ Marybeth Hicks

I learned from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this one fundamental statement, perhaps it is easy enough to define the duties of Man and Woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be first performed. Every other right can be shown to be a usurpation hardly worth fighting for. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Let us give future generations the gift of Earth citizenship by first giving it to ourselves. ~ Ilchi Lee

Any new pathway to citizenship is completely off the table ... [Illegal immigrants should be able to get citizenship] the same way as any other immigrant has to do it ... You have to apply for legal permanent residence, be it family-based or employment-based. You shouldn't be treated worse than the people doing it the right way, but I think it would be unconscionable for us to treat them better than the people who are doing it the right way. ~ Raul Labrador

They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among savior, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions. ~ Howard Zinn

The only way we can keep our freedom is to work at it. Not some of us. All of us. Not some of the time, but all of the time. ~ Spencer W. Kimball

Living exclusively in the land of the head or the heart will always be a limiting, limited experience. The most successful among us have dual citizenship. ~ Bill Crawford

Crucially, I'd like to thank Labour party members up and down the country for sticking with us. For their active citizenship, their willingness to engage in our democracy, and for being there at the cutting edge of making our democracy work. ~ David Blunkett

The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Every man among us is more fit to meet the duties and responsibilities of citizenship because of the perils over which, in the past, the nation has triumphed; because of the blood and sweat and tears, the labor and the anguish, through which, in the days that have gone, our forefathers moved on to triumph. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Be sure to forsake, to turn away from, any teaching in the world that will demand of you a "proof of goodness" by the renouncing of earthly joys, pleasures, happiness, possessions! Forget about the creed that tells you, that what you make in this life accounts for nothing in the next one. Life on this Earth is a gift and we do not accept good gifts only to throw them away later on! Make in this life laughter, joy, pleasure, attain good things and give to others good things, too. But never let your aim be to selflessness, for at the end of the day, our responsibilities are to our own selves and to those few whom we love and who truly love us. And holiness? Holiness is happiness, holiness is joy. ~ C. JoyBell C.

For the grand and inescapable tradition of western literary classics confronts us with fundamental choices over our understanding of words, reading and art, as well as citizenship, civilization, faith, and the whole notion of the true, the good, and the faithful. ~ Os Guinness

This invitation [to deny oneself] is less about depriving the self, and more about disowning, or renouncing a relationship with the part of ourself that is not what God created us to be. ~ Marilyn Vancil

The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into its army. But in the nineteenth century, the idea of the soldier was heavily entwined with the notion of masculinity and citizenship. How could an army constituted to defend slavery, with all of its assumptions about black inferiority, turn around and declare that blacks were worthy of being invited into Confederate ranks? As it happened, they could not. 'The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of our revolution,' observed Georgia politician Howell Cobb. 'And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.' There could be no win for white supremacy here. If blacks proved to be the cowards that 'the whole theory of slavery' painted them as, the battle would be lost. But much worse, should they fight effectively--and prove themselves capable of 'good Negro government'--then the larger war could never be won. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Citizenship means standing up for the lives that gun violence steals from us each day. I have seen the courage of parents, students, pastors, and police officers all over this country who say 'we are not afraid,' and I intend to keep trying, with or without Congress, to help stop more tragedies from visiting innocent Americans in our movie theaters, shopping malls, or schools like Sandy Hook. ~ Barack Obama

Christians have a dual citizenship - on earth and in heaven - and our citizenship in heaven ought to make us better people here on earth. ~ Warren W. Wiersbe

None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events. ~ Vaclav Havel

If the undocumented have to work hard to attain citizenship, those of us who already are citizens should have to work hard to sustain it. We should all have to serve more, vote more, build more, and do more for our country. ~ Eric Liu

Evolution, energy, and ethics are the core elements that will guide us along the challenging path toward the Life Era: the first - evolution - because a good understanding of our universal roots and of our place in the cosmic scheme of things will help us create a feasible future course; the second - energy - because our fate will bear strongly on the ways that humankind learns to use energy efficiently and safely; and the third - ethics - because global citizenship and a planetary society are crucial factors in the survival of our species. ~ Eric Chaisson

With all of the talk about polling and demographics, I think too many people have lost touch with the human and moral crisis of deportations. Every day, roughly 1,000 people are deported because the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives is denying the majority of the US Congress a chance to vote on citizenship. I will be arrested today because the labor movement stands with the families tragically ripped apart by John Boehner and the House Republicans' embrace of a broken immigration system. ~ Arlene Holt Baker

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship. ~ Barack Obama

It is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length erected, after so many ages, during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests, and nobles; and it is honorable for us to have produced the first legislature who had the courage to declare that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in bonds of fraternal feeling. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Wilderness offers us a template to an enlightened citizenship. Instead of only caring for ourselves, we are invited to care for species other than our own. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

When history as the world knows it no longer exists, and there are no longer any great kings or great wars or great political machinations; when there are no histories of countries left to cherish, no more dollars; when it's no longer the strong versus the weak, and all that's left is the story of the great God and King, and all has been righted, and the heroes are now the missionaries and the ministers of grace - of which every believer can be - and our eyes behold Him as He truly is ... words fail. That is where our heart ought to be. But we are not there. And yet, we are. Let us wait for that day, expectantly and eagerly. Let us fix our eyes on heaven, where our citizenship is held securely, where we are presently united to Christ in spirit. Only let us hold true to what we have already attained. And we will yet attain it. ~ Matt Chandler

In many places, the past fifteen years have been a time of economic turmoil and widening disparities. Anger and resentment are high. And yet economic policies that might address these concerns seem nearly impossible to enact. Instead of the seeds of reform, we are given the yoke of misdirection. We are told to forget the sources of our discontent because something more important is at stake: the fate of our civilization.

Yet what are these civilizations, these notions of Muslim-ness, Western-ness, European-ness, American-ness, that attempt to describe where, and with whom, we belong? They are illusions: arbitrarily drawn constructs with porous, brittle, and overlapping borders. To what civilization does a Syrian atheist belong? A Muslim soldier in the US army? A Chinese professor in Germany? A lesbian fashion designer in Nigeria? After how many decades of US citizenship does a Spanish-speaking Honduran-born couple, with two generations of American children and grandchildren descended from them, cease to belong to a Latin American civilization and take their place in an American one?

Civilizations are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalization's brutality. They allow us, for example, to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor; to claim that we believe in democracy and human equality, and yet to stymie the cre ~ Mohsin Hamid

Using the latest in science and technology to shatter today's economic paradigm of 'insatiable individuals competing for scarce resources,' Planetary Citizenship brings us full circle to the ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples and the sacredness of creation. ~ Rebecca Adamson

The choice before us is plain: Christ or chaos, conviction or compromise, discipline or disintegration. I am rather tired of hearing about our rights and privileges as Americans. The time is come - it is now - when we ought to hear about the duties and responsibilities of our citizenship. America's future depends upon her accepting and demonstrating God's government. ~ Peter Marshall