Virgil Goode Quotes

Since the days of Greece and Rome, when the word 'citizen' was a title of honor, we have often seen more emphasis put on the rights of citizenship than on its responsibilities.

Citizenship is a lifetime job.

Citizenship is not a transaction where you put your taxes in and take your services out. It is a relationship.

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.

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

Talk of citizenship today is often thin and tinny. The word has a faintly old-fashioned feel to it when used in everyday conversation. When evoked in national politics, it's usually accompanied by the shrill whine of a descending culture-war mortar.

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

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

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.

An actual residence of such a length of time as would give a man an opportunity of esteeming the Government from knowing its intrinsic value, was essentially necessary to assure us of a man’s becoming a good citizen.

We need democracy - but right now democracy needs us! It needs self-assured citizens who have confidence and drive, common sense and decency, and who show solidarity with others.

I just wanna write about what I am living as a citizen. That's all.

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

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.

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

Conservatives forget that citizenship is more than a thing to withhold from immigrants. Progressives forget it's more than a set of rights.

We must create a state that responds to the citizens' needs, and we need citizens who feel committed to their state because that state serves the citizens.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.

Voting is a civic sacrament.

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

The first duty of an American citizen, then is that he shall work in politics.

Citizens are not born. They are raised.

The modern idea of citizenship goes some way to accommodating the tension between solidarity and diversity. Citizenship is not an ethnic, blood-and-soil concept, but a more abstract political idea - implying equal legal, political and social rights (and duties) for people inhabiting a given national space.

Citizenship is no light trifle to be jeopardized at any moment Congress decides to do so under the name of its general or implied grants of power.