Eric Liu Quotes
True patriots measure themselves not by personal wealth or power but by the degree to which they contribute to the community.
The next time someone uses denial of citizenship as a weapon or brandishes the special status conferred upon him by the accident of birth, ask him this: What have you done lately to earn it?
Today's multiracial Americans are at greater liberty to choose how they'd like to be seen, and under less pressure to pass for white.
The Boomers have modeled a set of bad habits, and one grand gesture is not going to unwind all those bad habits.
Identity in America is complicated but it's also simple: it's about whom you identify with and who identifies with you.
As it stands now, those of us who are lucky enough to be citizens by birth don't have to do much. Very little is asked of us.
Throughout this country's history there have of course been systematic efforts to create an official underclass.
To be sure, the United States has profound problems, not least our faltering educational and physical infrastructure.
To love country means to rise above I am because I am. It is to recognize that I am because we are.
'The Purpose-Driven Life' is not just a mega-bestselling work of Christian faith; it is the thing that every voter, secular or not, yearns for.
Conservatives forget that citizenship is more than a thing to withhold from immigrants. Progressives forget it's more than a set of rights.
In the end no segregationist scheme has withstood the force of a simple idea: equality under law.
You want to defend citizenship? Don't persecute or isolate those without papers. Just live like a citizen. That'd be a first-class way to be American.
Honest people know that the road to success and virtue always involves shared sacrifice, hard work, and gratification postponed. Telling people otherwise isn't leadership, it is pandering.
My grandfather was a general in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during World War II, and I grew up hearing the pilot stories and seeing pictures of him in uniform.
The strongest streak in the American character is a fierce pragmatism that mistrust blind ideology of every stripe and insists on finding what really works.
I had heard so much negative talk about our generation, that we're slackers and young fogies, that I knew wasn't true of the people I know.
Much of our national debate proceeds as if China and America were locked in a zero-sum game in which one's loss is precisely the other's gain.
Sometimes when I listen to fellow progressives, I wonder if the only lesson we took away from the '04 elections is that politics is a word game.
Great numbers of Asian Americans do not fit the model minority or 'tiger family' stereotypes, living instead in multigenerational poverty far from the mainstream.
With food still scarce, there was no longer a right to exist. You needed to earn your spot.
