Quotes By Eric Liu

Many smart folks seem to think that if you just get your metaphors and messages right, you'll win. That if you start describing what you favor as a 'moral value' - 'affordable health care is a moral value' etc., - then you'll appeal to red-state voters.

Here's a proposal, offered only partly in jest: no resident of the United States, whether born here or abroad, should get to be a citizen until age 18, at which time each such resident has to take a test.

When Bryan Price taught me how to throw a changeup, he made me see myself. All my life, I've been the equivalent of a fastball pitcher - trying to use blazing speed and brute force to wow the people around me.

Identity in America is complicated but it's also simple: it's about whom you identify with and who identifies with you.

Jeremy Lin is the only Asian American in the NBA today and one of the few in any professional U.S. sport. His arrival is surely leading other talented Asian American athletes this week to contemplate a pro career.

From the right, you get demagogues shouting about brown-skinned anchor babies and clamoring to deport the undocumented. From the left, you get advocacy for the oppressed but otherwise, when it comes to national civic identity, mainly silence.

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.

True fans of the Constitution, like true fans of the national pastime, acknowledge the critical role of human judgment in making tough calls. We don't expect flawless interpretation. We expect good faith. We demand honesty.

America is exceptional: but because it yields the likes of Obama, not the likes of Bush.

Americans need to call on Boomers, in their next act onstage, to behave like grown-ups. And there is no better way for them to do this than to guide young people to lives of greater meaning, effectiveness, and purpose.

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.

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.

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.

You cannot mistake Bush's clarity of purpose. He believes in a story about freedom and opportunity that makes his followers feel like they aren't just ticking their days down but are part of something larger than themselves.

Throughout this country's history there have of course been systematic efforts to create an official underclass.

In the end no segregationist scheme has withstood the force of a simple idea: equality under law.

The summer of 1991, I took $2,000 of my savings and a desktop program, and I asked my friends to write 800 words about something they cared about. I got eight or nine articles and put them together. It was no frills, black and white, no graphics. I printed them out and just dumped piles around D.C.

Republicans say they want citizenship to truly mean something. Let's be equal-opportunity about it and test everyone, including those very Republicans and others whose forbears came here generations ago.

Imagine filling a college with the first 1,000 students to get perfect SATs. Whatever the racial composition of that class would be, the notion seems absurd because we know that college in America is supposed to be about creating citizens and leaders in a diverse nation.

To be sure, the United States has profound problems, not least our faltering educational and physical infrastructure.

Six decades ago, as Mao's Communists seized power, the question in Washington was, 'Who lost China?' Now, as his capitalist descendants stand astride the world stage and Washington worries about decline, it seems to be, 'Who lost America?'