Eric Liu Quotes

Civic imagination and innovation and creativity are emerging from local ecosystems now and radiating outward, and this great innovation, this great wave of localism that's now arriving, and you see it...

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 t...

About Author

Eric P. Liu (Traditional Chinese: 劉柏川; born 1968) is an American lawyer and CEO and co-founder of Citizen University, a non-profit organization promoting civic empowerment. Liu served as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy at the White House between 1999 and 2000. He served as Speechwriter and Director of Legislative Affairs for the National Security Council at the White House from 1993 to 1994.
President Obama nominated him in January 2015 to serve on the board of directors of the federal Corporation for National and Community Service and he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate; his term expired in December 2017.

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.

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

This is why it is so fundamental for us right now to grab hold of this idea of power and to democratize it. One of the things that is so profoundly exciting and challenging about this moment is that a...

Uses a method for organizing that centers on three nested narratives: the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now. He teaches organizers entering into any setting to start not with policy...

We live in a great country. It's time again to get religion about it.

It was there, during the 1960s, that his evolution into a firebrand revolutionary began. He became a vocal leader in the emerging Chicano movement. He joined black student activist Larry Gossett, Nati...

To me, this passage is essentially the Chinese equivalent of the Socratic claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. It has exactly the same rhetorical assertiveness and moral severity: the u...

Every person and institution with power in our society today has it because we give it to them.

• First, power concentrates. That is, it feeds on itself and compounds (as does powerlessness). • Second, power justifies itself. People invent stories to legitimize the power they have (or lack). • T...

Meaning, though, changes with time; text with context. What am I to do? There was a time, as in the minutes after we learned of my father’s death, when those words or words roughly like them, uttered...

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...

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

We tend to think of politics as bad, full of dirty tricks, negative ads, big campaigns, but I am here to explore the original meaning of politics, which is positive and has to do with balancing compet...

Have you ever watched someone become American? Last week, at a national citizenship conference I organize, thirty immigrants from 17 countries swore an oath and became citizens of the United States. I...

The Bechdel-Wallace test is a similarly simple device, created by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace, for evaluating whether movies and television shows perpetuate gender inequit...

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...

'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.

We haven’t truly enabled all the people of this society to participate in self-government to the fullest extent of their potential. We haven’t come close, not in an age when our elected officials and...