Corliss Lamont Quotes

If you love your country you’ll find ways somehow to speak out to do what you think is right.

For citizens to always be ready to defend and to maintain American ideals of public justice and liberty would add to the self respect of the people. It will teach the people to think of their government as a unified and exalted power for good in the world—humane, unselfish, and aspiring.

I am determined to be a first class citizen.

Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.

I have spent my life fighting for our country and our values. When those values are jeopardized, when our democracy is threatened, I believe it is our responsibility to speak out and demand accountability.

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

From my father's point of view, without a thought for self, a true patriot stands up against the stones of condemnation and speaks for those who are given no real voice in the halls of justice or the halls of government.

During President George W. Bush's two terms, you couldn't drive far without seeing a particular bumper sticker: 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.'

Now, when our nation to ruin's brink is verging, let us speak while there is time! Now, when the padlocks for our lips are forging. Silence is crime!

Is it possible that the people of the U.S. enjoying the blessings of freedom under the only republican government on earth have not virtue enough to support it?

The citizens of America are her monarchs. No country deserves so well of its people, and none is so dependent upon them.

You have a task; go bravely home and take it up like men …. Do your duty also as citizens of the United States, do your duty as men who feel a responsibility upon you, and remember, friends, that it is better to die an uncrowned free man than a crowned slave. You and I must protest against this injustice to the American people that we are suffering

The battle of freedom is to be fought out on principle.

We have a great nation to help govern. We who are citizens of this great republic are favored children, yet we are all the time complaining; but that is one of the inalienable privileges of an American to complain about his neighbor and government-always crying for a change. But, with all of its faults, this is the best government for man on the face of the earth

Liberty was realized when the citizens were ... willing to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the community

Freedom and liberty lose out by default because good people are not vigilant.

I wish more people would take a stand and stand up for the principles on which this country was founded.

Whatever I do, it will be fighting for social justice.

You need to understand something, you drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty and opportunity that you did not dig. You eat lavishly from banquet tables prepared for you by your ancestors. You sit under the shade of trees that you did not plant or cultivate or care for. You have a choice in life, you can just sit back, getting fat, dumb, and happy, consuming all the blessings put before you, or it can metabolize inside of you, become fuel to get you into the fight, to make this democracy real, to make it true to its words that we can be a nation of liberty and justice for all.

If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.

Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvellous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.

As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.