Nat Hentoff Quotes

I had become increasingly concerned in recent years about the lack of civics education in our nation's schools. In recent years, the schools have stopped teaching it. And it's unfortunate.

I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.

Half the states have stopped making civics and government a requirement for high school. Half.

When you Google me, you'll find a lot of people don't like Richard Dreyfuss. Because I'm cocky and I present a cocky attitude. But no one has ever disagreed with the notion I represent, that we need more civic education. So far there's 100 percent support for that.

Civic education and civic responsibility should be taught in elementary school.

It is absolutely the case that much needs to be done to invigorate and elevate the quality of civic learning in America

Let's summon the courage to insist on a minimal level of civic knowledge for the citizens empowered to decide our fate.

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

I grew up in San Francisco. And so I'm informed in a certain kind of way about, you know, believing in democracy and believing in America. And I'm a very ardent patriot.

I wanted to be what my high-school civics and history teacher thought of as a good American. That automatically involved taking an interest in government.

Voting is a civic sacrament - the highest responsibility we have as Americans.

It seems to me that we're in danger of losing sight of certain basic civic values in society by allowing the growth of a whole generation of people who really have no sense of attachment to society.

A constitutional democracy is in serious trouble if its citizenry does not have a certain degree of education and civic virtue.

The values and voices of democracy are silent. Either we have lost touch with those values or, no better, believe they need not or cannot be taught.

The role we can play every day, if we try, is to take the whole experience of every day and shape it to involve American man. It is our job to interest him in his community and to give his ideas the excitement they should have.

To place and power all public spirit tends, In place and power all public spirit ends; Like hardy plants, that love the air and sky, When out, 'twill thrive—but taken in, 'twill die!

How shall those who practice election frauds recover that respect for the sanctity of the ballot which is the first condition and obligation of good citizenship? The man who has come to regard the ballot box as a juggler's hat has renounced his allegiance.

I rejoice in having so favorable an opportunity of felicitating the State of Rhode Island on the co-operation I am sure to find in the measures adopted by the guardians of literature in this place, for improving the morals of the rising generation, and inculcating upon their minds principles peculiarly calculated for the preservation of our rights and liberties. You may rely on whatever protection I may be able to afford in so important an object as the education of our youth.

A popular society must provide a school for citizens where through the best, most accessible and direct means they may be educated in the pure doctrine of Patriotism.

I think public life for me has a slightly didactic role, OK.

Voting is how we participate in a civic society - be it for president, be it for a municipal election. It's the way we teach our children - in school elections - how to be citizens, and the importance of their voice.

Essentially, social education is moral education, and moral education is preparation for citizenship... When Jefferson and others advocated public education, it was to prepare for citizenship in a new, constitutional, democratic society.