Eric Liu Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“Why should citizenship be a matter of birth? The premise held by those who want to end birthright citizenship is that some people deserve it and some do not - that the status shouldn't be handed out automatically. Frankly, that's a premise worth considering.”

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

“After watching my first World Series in 1977, I wanted to be Reggie Jackson. I bought a big Reggie poster. I ate Reggie candy bars. I entered a phase during which I insisted on having the same style of glasses Reggie had: gold wire frames with the double bar across.”

“What we should celebrate more than diversity is what we do with it. How do we bring everyone in the tent and create something together? In a twenty-first century way that activates our true potential, we all need to become sworn-again.”

“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.”

“The Boomers have modeled a set of bad habits, and one grand gesture is not going to unwind all those bad habits.”

“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.”

“It turns out umpires and judges are not robots or traffic cameras, inertly monitoring deviations from a fixed zone of the permissible. They are humans.”

“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.”