America Quote by Richard Rodriguez

“In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I avoid falling into the black-and-white dialectic in which most of America still seems trapped. I have always recognized that, as an American, I am in relationship with other parts of the world; that I have to measure myself against the Pacific, against Asia. Having to think of myself in relationship to that horizon has liberated me from the black-and-white checkerboard.”

Richard Rodriguez

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More by Richard Rodriguez

“Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.”

Richard Rodriguez

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In the Sacramento of the 1950s, it was as though White simply hadn't had time enough to figure Brown out. It was a busy…

Richard Rodriguez

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Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the…

Richard Rodriguez

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Mexico is sex and Canada is mind. There is much about Canada that I find admirable - the treatment of immigrants, for example, particularly those from Central America during the recent civil wars there. But there is confusion too: I know of Croatian Nazis who are subsidized by the Canadian government to maintain their racist culture. There is Canada, trying…

Richard Rodriguez

My decision was sparked by affirmative action. There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to me -…

Richard Rodriguez

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Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there was nothing…

Richard Rodriguez

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I have a good black friend who is a doctor, but he didn't become a doctor because he saw other black men who were doctors. He became a doctor because his mother cleaned office buildings at night, and because she loved her children. She grew bowlegged from cleaning office buildings at night, and in the process she taught him something…

Richard Rodriguez

I think the universities have co-opted the intellectual, by and large. But there is an emerging intellectual set coming out of Washington think tanks…

Richard Rodriguez

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You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That…

Richard Rodriguez

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After the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published in Harper's,…

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What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin of Mexico City, which is more and more aware of how little it controls Tijuana politically and culturally. In addition to whorehouses and discos, Tijuana now has Korean factories and Japanese industrialists and Central American refugees, and a…

Richard Rodriguez

We're looking at complexity. We're looking at blond kids in Beverley Hills who can speak Spanish because they have been raised by Guatemalan nannies.…

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More America quotes

The costs of the Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now estimated to run as high as $4.4 trillion - a major victory for Osama bin Laden, whose announced goal was to bankrupt America by drawing it into a trap. The 2011 military budget - almost matching that of the rest of the world combined - is higher in…

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Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who…

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Well, The Day the Earth Caught Fire was a story... I don't if anybody knows what it is but it was about... in the…

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So here's what I want you to know, and here's what I want all our men and women in uniform to know: Because of…

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Today, the world looks to America for leadership. And America looks to its Corps of Marines.

Ronald Reagan

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The image of blacks usually is one of people who are suffering from hunger, unemployment, and poverty. The idea of them as agents and activists - as starting revolutions - does not exist in most people's minds. And I think it's very, very important that folks understand how much this country was founded on the enslavement of blacks, and how…

Grace Lee Boggs

I'll smoke, I'll cough, I'll get the tumors, I'll die, deal? Thank you America. [salutes]

Bill Hicks

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America is a democracy and has no Hitler, but I am afraid for her future; there are hard times ahead for the American people,…

Albert Einstein

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I'm gonna bring America together.

Donald Trump

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In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel.:; Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia.:; The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no…

George Orwell