Quote

Learning can cause social fracture. Your people start expressing themselves.

Richard Rodriguez

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Rodriguez
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: July 31
Journalist
Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Fracture
Expressing
Cause
Learning
Causes
Start
Social
People

More quotes by Richard Rodriguez

Image
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
Image
I had all this anxiety about what it meant to be a minority. My professors - the same men who taught me the intricacies of language - just shied away from the issue. They didn't want to talk about it, other than to suggest I could be a role model to other Hispanics - when I went back to my barrio, I suppose.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
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, I got this rather angry letter from a gay-and-lesbian group that was organizing a protest against the magazine. It was the same old problem: political groups have almost no sense of irony.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
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
Image
So, rather than becoming multicultural, rather than becoming a person of several languages, rather than becoming confident in your knowledge of the world, you become just the opposite. You end up in college having to apologize for the fact that you no longer speak your native language.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
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
Image
I think what education gives you is a voice. It gives you a way of talking to a judge. When a policeman pulls you off to the side of the road, you have a voice. When you cross a border, you have a voice. When you are writing to express your opinions, you have a voice.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
But America isn't a country of family values Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
So many of my friends tell me they’re not religious. I’m like, Of course you’re religious. You watch Oprah Winfrey, don’t you?
Richard Rodriguez
Image
I keep trying to tell people that Los Angeles is already the largest Indian city in the U.S., that there are Toltecs playing Little League baseball in Pasadena, Mayans making beds at the Marriott in Westwood, and Chichimecs driving buses in L.A. Los Angeles is a majority-Indian city.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Affirmative action ignores our society's real minorities - members of the disadvantaged classes, no matter what their race. We have this ludicrous bureaucratic sense that certain racial groups, regardless of class, are minorities. So what happens is those minorities at the very top of the ladder get chosen for everything.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
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
Image
Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there was nothing wrong with that. I thought there was something very wrong. I still do. I think race-based affirmative action is crude and absolutely mistaken.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
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
Image
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