Benjamin N. Cardozo Quotes

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

Citizenship is basic to all other claims which individuals make on the state, or the state makes upon them.

I'm a civilian, a citizen.

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.

The most important office, ... that of private citizen.

Free citizens have two distinct sets of civil liberties. As the makers of the laws, they have duties and responsibilities which require an absolute freedom. As the subjects of the laws, they have possessions and rights, to which belongs a relative freedom.

The American citizen has the right to come to the seat of government to assert any claim he may have upon that government, to transact any business he may have with it, to seek its protection, to share its offices, to engage in administering its functions. He has the right of free access to its seaports, through which all operations of foreign commerce are conducted, to the sub-treasuries, land offices, and courts of justice in the several States.

There should be constitutional liberty of speech and freedom of thought, which is the elementary right of every citizen under any civilized form of Government

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.

A man's mere property status, without more, cannot be used by a state to test, qualify or limit his rights as a citizen of the United States.

Citizenship is the right to have rights.

These are three American citizens and we really demand answers for American citizens.

I am not the President. Instead, I hold an even higher office, that of citizen of the United States.

Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.

We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.

No citizen is apolitical; as a citizen, by definition, has to take interest in public affairs.

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

A man, and yet not a man. In flesh and blood alive; politically dead.” …. They are not slaves, but they are not, in a political sense, ‘persons’.

Personal liberty and personal rights are placed in the keeping of the nation, that the right to life, liberty, and property shall be guarantied to the citizen in reality ... We must make American citizenship the shield that protects every citizen, on every foot of our soil.

We cannot accede to the proposition ... that the citizens of the several states are permitted to participate in all the rights which belong exclusively to the citizens of any other particular state.

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.

You have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject.

The right to speak freely concerning functions of the Federal Government is a privilege of immunity of every citizen of the United States which, even before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, a State was powerless to curtail.

The right to control their own government according to constitutional forms is not one of the rights that the citizens of this country are called upon to surrender in time of war.

When a system goes astray, it is the right and obligation of citizens to oppose it and change it-for themselves and for generations to come