Top 40 Eric Liu Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you don’t learn how to practice power, someone else will do it for you – in your name, on your turf, with your voice, and often against your interests.”

— Eric Liu

2. “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.”

— Eric Liu

3. “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.”

— Eric Liu

4. “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 competing interests and looking for solutions.”

— Eric Liu

5. “True patriots believe that freedom from responsibility is selfishness, freedom from sacrifice is cowardice, freedom from tolerance is prejudice, freedom from stewardship is exploitation, and freedom from compassion is cruelty.”

— Eric Liu

6. “There have been, in recent years, many Asian American pioneers in the public eye who’ve defied the condescendingly complimentary ‘model minority’ stereotype: actors like Lucy Liu, artists like Maya Lin, moguls like Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. They are known, often admired.”

— Eric Liu

7. “Society becomes how you behave.”

— Eric Liu

8. “Great numbers of Asian Americans do not fit the model minority or ‘tiger family’ stereotypes, living instead in multigenerational poverty far from the mainstream.”

— Eric Liu

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

— Eric Liu

10. “We all want merit to mean something, and we all may be tempted to reduce that meaning to something measurable and concrete like an SAT score. The reality, though, is that who deserves entry into an institution depends on what the institution exists to do.”

— Eric Liu

11. “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.”

— Eric Liu

12. “The nativism behind the push to repeal or amend the Fourteenth is ugly and obvious.”

— Eric Liu

13. “To love country means to rise above I am because I am. It is to recognize that I am because we are.”

— Eric Liu

14. “Power justifies itself, in countless small ways. But one of the big ways it does so is by creating an ideological narrative about how things got to be this way – and what must now change. These narratives are more than technical explanations. They are epic morality tales, and they typically follow this sequence: Paradise Paradise Lost Paradise Redeemed.”

— Eric Liu

15. “And that brings me to my definition of power, which is simply this: the capacity to make others do what you would have them do. It sounds menacing, doesn’t it? We don’t like to talk about power. We find it scary. We find it somehow evil. We feel uncomfortable naming it. In the culture and mythology of democracy, power resides with the people.”

— Eric Liu

16. “If you want to change the story that justifies current structures of power and privilege, you must have such a combination of bold goals and specific steps.”

— Eric Liu

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

— Eric Liu

18. “In the end, a new Americanization movement can’t just be about listing our privileges and immunities, which we catalog in our laws. It also has to be about reinforcing our duties, which we convey in our habits.”

— Eric Liu

19. “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.”

— Eric Liu

20. “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.”

— Eric Liu

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

— Eric Liu

22. “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.”

— Eric Liu

23. “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.”

— Eric Liu

24. “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?”

— Eric Liu

25. “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.”

— Eric Liu

26. “The boomers will eventually have to accept that it is not possible to stay young forever or to stop aging. But it is possible by committing to show up for each others in community after community, to earn a measure of immortality.”

— Eric Liu

27. “If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness – just a drop of it – does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.”

— Eric Liu

28. “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.”

— Eric Liu

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

— Eric Liu

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

— Eric Liu

31. “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.”

— Eric Liu

32. “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.”

— Eric Liu

33. “Conservatives forget that citizenship is more than a thing to withhold from immigrants. Progressives forget it’s more than a set of rights.”

— Eric Liu

34. “Today, public understanding of our past and our system of government is pitifully low.”

— Eric Liu

35. “True patriots measure themselves not by personal wealth or power but by the degree to which they contribute to the community.”

— Eric Liu

36. “In our country, there is so much that’s wrong with the way we deliver care to the aging, the very young, and the infirm. But you can’t beat something with nothing. It is not enough to decry what’s broken. You have to describe the alternative and make it possible for people to believe in it. To care.”

— Eric Liu

37. “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?’”

— Eric Liu

38. “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.”

— Eric Liu

39. “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.”

— Eric Liu

40. “True patriots believe that we should measure a citizen’s worth by contribution to country and community, not by wealth or power-that those whom America has benefited most should contribute in proportion to their good fortune-and that serving others should be esteemed more highly than serving self.”

— Eric Liu

41. “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.”

— Eric Liu

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

— Eric Liu

43. “Why does an iPhone cost only a couple hundred dollars? Because, as the stage performer Mike Daisey depicted in an arresting one-man show called ‘The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,’ Apple’s shiniest products are made by a shadowy company in China called Foxconn.”

— Eric Liu

44. “Throughout this country’s history there have of course been systematic efforts to create an official underclass.”

— Eric Liu

45. “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.”

— Eric Liu

46. “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.”

— Eric Liu