Quote of the Week

I am lucky. I have the angels of words beside me. So many of us are silent.
--Luis Alberto Urrea, Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life

Quote of the Week

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.
--Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

Quote of the Week

Live people constitute a forgotten minority, while the mythical ones are remembered only too well.
--Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890

Quote of the Week

My Latin roots are very strong. All my life, because I'm blonde and blue-eyed, people who aren't Hispanic can't believe I am. And people who are Hispanic always think I'm not, because I don't look like them. Being Latin is part of who I am and I bring that part to every role.
--Cameron Diaz

Quote of the Week

If Mormons like not my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall.
--Ray Bradbury, "Coda" from Fahrenheit 451

Quote of the Week

The conservatives love their cheap labor; the liberals love their cheap cause. (Neither group, you will notice, ever invites the immigrants to move into their homes. Not into their homes!)
--Edward Abbey, “Immigration and Liberal Taboos”

Quote of the Week

Not to know what has been transacted in the past is to be always a child.
--Cicero

Quote of the Week

In short, if you are on the receiving end of the game-of-power, any excuse will do to keep you there. If you are seen as low-IQ you are despised and kept there because of that. If you are seen as high-IQ you are feared and kept there because of that.
--Isaac Asimov, “Thinking About Thinking”

Quote of the Week

History is a muse you glimpse bathing between leaves. The more you shift your point of view, the more is revealed.
--Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

Quote of the Week

I rarely wear clothes when I'm home by myself. I love making breakfast naked. But you've got to make sure the gardener's not coming that day.
--Kristen Bell

My comment:

Wait! Kristen Bell has a gardener?

Quote of the Week

The Romans did not mind being defended and maintained by outlanders so long as they could continue the fiction that they were the masters; they had now been told too bluntly that they were not.
--R. A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome

Quote of the Week

American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.
--Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East

Quote of the Week

Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.
--Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Quote of the Week

So instead of asking why we can't be considered American like everyone else, let's ask, why can't everyone else be more like us?
--Ed Morales, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America

Quote of the Week

Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.
--Casey Kasem

Quote of the Week

We don’t see stories about people like me or my dad. Indeed, network executives say to my face that I don’t exist. That’s the problem.
--Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, "The problem with “Devious Maids” goes far beyond Hollywood", NBCLatino.com, June 07, 2013.

Quote of the Week

A Humphrey Bogart, a Jimmy Stewart, a Cary Grant, a Spencer Tracy —- these were icons whose characters often dealt with female stars as equals, who had sex appeal to burn but weren’t defined by their libidos or their list of conquests, who dealt in violence sparingly or not at all. Likewise in Victorian fiction, in books as eagerly devoured by the masses as any blockbuster entertainment today: How often is a rake or cad presented as a worthy model, how often is a killer celebrated for his body count? How often does a Dickens or a Tolstoy or a Trollope leave the impression that the masculine ideal involves dealing violence indiscriminately and sleeping with every blonde who catches your eye? Is Steerforth the hero of “David Copperfield”? Is Wickham the male ideal held up by “Pride and Prejudice”? In Western literature, who better embodies “traditional masculinity” as an aspirational ideal —- Vronsky or Darcy? Angel Clare or Gabriel Oak? Raskolnikov the murderer or Raskolnikov the penitent?
--Ross Douthat, "The Left and Masculinity," New York Times Blogs, June 3, 2014

Quote of the Week

I’m a mixed breed and hope to live longer because of it.
--Charisma Carpenter

Quote of the Week

Seldom do people see themselves in the words of others.
--Tom Miller, The Panama Hat Trail: A Journey from South America

Quote of the Week

There is no art without anger, but anger alone doesn't make good art.
--Ilan Stavans, Art & Anger: Essays on Politics and the Imagination