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When a society doesn't know what to do with its young, it's in real trouble. When the young don't know what to do with society - at the very least, revolutions start there.

Richard Rodriguez

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Richard Rodriguez
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: July 31
Journalist
Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Doesn
Young
Real
Revolutions
Revolution
Trouble
Least
Start
Society

More quotes by Richard Rodriguez

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There is San Diego - this retirement village, with its prim petticoat, that doesn't want to get too near the water. San Diego worries about all the turds washing up on the lovely, pristine beaches of La Jolla. San Diego wishes Mexico would have fewer babies. And San Diego, like the rest of America, is growing middle-aged.
Richard Rodriguez
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A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn't forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.
Richard Rodriguez
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The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.
Richard Rodriguez
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What really terrifies Americans is the prospect that the Indian is very much alive, that the Indian is having nine babies in Guatemala, and that those nine babies are headed this way. This is one reason why Americans hold on so dearly to the myth of the dead Indian.
Richard Rodriguez
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I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.
Richard Rodriguez
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Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.
Richard Rodriguez
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The popular idea of a role model implies that an adult's influence on a child is primarily occupational, and that all a black child needs is to see a black doctor, and then this child will think, Oh, I can become a doctor too.
Richard Rodriguez
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We're looking at such enormous complexity and variety that it makes a mockery of celebrating diversity. In the L.A. of the future, no one will need to say, Let's celebrate diversity. Diversity is going to be a fundamental part of our lives. That's what it's going to mean to be modern.
Richard Rodriguez
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Learning can cause social fracture. Your people start expressing themselves.
Richard Rodriguez
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The average age in the U.S. is now thirty-three, whereas Mexico gets younger and younger, retreats deeper and deeper into adolescence. Mexico is fifteen. Mexico is wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and wandering around Tijuana looking for a job, for a date, for something to put on her face to take care of the acne.
Richard Rodriguez
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I find L.A. very interesting, partly because I think something new is forming there, but not in a moment of good fellowship as you might think from all this diversity claptrap. It's not as if we'll all go down to the Civic Center in our ethnic costumes and dance around.
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 is not Mexico that is some crude Americanism you have absorbed.
Richard Rodriguez
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In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.
Richard Rodriguez
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Education is that human process of feeling your body mature, feeding your mind with ideas that it never had before, or information you never had. You simply cannot do that on a computer.
Richard Rodriguez
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I don't think writers should be convenient examples. I don't think we should make people feel settled. I don't try to be a gadfly, but I do think that real ideas are troublesome. There should be something about my work that leaves the reader unsettled. I intend that.
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 white time. Brown was like the skinny or fat kids left over after the team captains chose sides. You take the rest — my cue to wander away to the sidelines, to wander away.
Richard Rodriguez
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In Sacramento, my brown was not halfway between black and white. On the leafy streets, on the east side of town, where my family lived, where Asians did not live, where Negroes did not live, my family's Mexican shades passed as various.
Richard Rodriguez
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The Indians had to be either killed, or herded into reservations, which were essentially concentration camps, and forgotten. Their history had to be absolutely obliterated so that we could believe that we were living on virgin soil.
Richard Rodriguez
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Henry Ford didn't just create a cheap way of getting away from your in-laws he basically understood that there was something in us as a culture that wanted to be on the move, that wanted to get out.
Richard Rodriguez
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Most American Hispanics don't belong to one race, either. I keep telling kids that, when filling out forms, they should put yes to everything - yes, I am Chinese yes, I am African yes, I am white yes, I am a Pacific Islander yes, yes, yes - just to befuddle the bureaucrats who think we live separately from one another.
Richard Rodriguez