Civics Quotes

• People reared in workhouses, as you are aware, are no great acquisition to the community and they have no ideas whatsoever of civic responsibilities. As a rule their highest aim is to live at the expense of the ratepayers. Consequently, it would be a decided gain if they all took it into their heads to emigrate. When they go abroad they are thrown on their own responsibilities and have to work whether they like it or not.

  

  W. T. Cosgrave
  • People
  • Community
  • Responsibility

• The reason the government sells the census as your ticket to getting goodies - rather than as your civic duty - is that distributing goodies is now all the government does.

  

  Tom G. Palmer
  • Government
  • Reason
  • Duty

• Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.

  

  William James
  • People
  • Democracy
  • Genius

• The walls are raised against honest men in civic life.

  

  William H. O'Connell
  • Men
  • Wall
  • Honest

• You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

  

  Arthur Ashe
  • Life
  • History
  • Equality

• Our disregard of civic and moral virtue as an educational priority is having a tangible effect on the attitudes, understanding and behavior of large portions of the youth population in the United States today.

  

  William Damon
  • Understanding
  • Attitude
  • Behavior

• The dignity of the act is the deliberate, circumspect, open, and serene performance by these men in the clear light of day, and by a concurrent purpose, of a civic duty, which embraced the greatest hazards to themselves and to all the people from whom they held this deputed discretion, but which, to their sober judgments, promised benefits to that people and their posterity, from generation to generation, exceeding these hazards and commensurate with its own fitness.

  

  William M. Evarts
  • People
  • Purpose
  • Judgment

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

  

  Sandra Day O'Connor
  • School
  • Government
  • Civics

• Even civics classes have almost disappeared from the schools. So things have not gotten any better.

  

  Nat Hentoff
  • Schools
  • Disappeared
  • Civics

• If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.

  

  Henry Louis Gates
  • Articles
  • Civics