A Quote by Octavio Paz
Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.
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For the next fifty years this alone shall be our keynote - this, our great Mother India. Let all other vain gods disappear for the time from our minds. This is the only god that is awake, our own race - "everywhere his hands, everywhere his feet, everywhere his ears, he covers everything." All other gods are sleeping. What vain gods shall we go after and yet cannot worship the god that we see all round us, the Virât? When we have worshiped this, we shall be able to worship all other gods.
Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
I'm Mexican-American, but for a long time I was pushed out of any references to Mexican-American writers. It was easier to come out as a gay man than it was to come out as a Mexican-American.
I am very happy here [on Cuba], but I feel I have work to do in the United States. It's where I can identify with the total world struggle for socialism. But I think as a North American, as a Black North American, I have certain understandings - certain contributions - to make that are unique to the North Amerian experience.
The North American media have been very difficult and very critical of Julio Cesar Chavez. Why?... Because a Mexican broke the records of Muhammad Ali.
I'm aware of what my effect on the populous could be, and I try to use it in a positive way, whether it be in an Instagram post or a tweet, or promoting whatever new job that I have. I don't figure too much as a Latino man coming up, or a certain ethnic man. I'm very, very proud of being a Mexican-American man, but I would rather people just see me as a man coming up who just happens to be Mexican.
The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush--sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. The ordinary citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes.... It is they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while their 'betters' were derelict.
I'm mixed race - my dad's Caucasian, and my mom's Mexican - so I want to play anything and everything, from American to Latino, the whole spectrum; I'm insatiable.
In North America, what happens often is that they put race before nationhood. Everyone here is Hispanic-American, Chinese-American, African-American. But really, we're just North Americans of all these different descents. The only time I notice North Americans becoming national is when a war happens or a crisis happens.
For a woman to go out alone into architecture is still very, very hard. It's still a man's world.
Mexican boxing is very aggressive; you go forward with great heart. The American style is always that you run around, you try to be elusive. The Mexican style is much better. I never tried to be elusive.
The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability.
The men who have had the most to give to their fellow men are those who have enriched their minds and hearts in solitude. It is a poor education that does not fit a man to be alone with himself.
Corruption is a fact of life in America as in Afganistan, but as American citizens, if we are white, we tend to experience it as an opportunity cost. I live in Washington, DC, where the city council is notoriously corrupt. But how do I experience that? Maybe in streets that are not as well paved as they could be, maybe in a bridge that costs a lot more money than it should have. That's a little bit abstract - shocking, of course - but still abstract.
When an American asks for the cooperation of his fellow citizens, it is seldom refused; and I have often seen it afforded spontaneously and with great good will.
It is useless saying that we do not accept the gods of the primitive world. In form, no; in essence, yes. The fact before us is that all ideas of gods can be traced to the earliest stages of human history.... There is an unbroken line of descent linking the gods of the most primitive peoples to those of modern man. We reject the world of the savage; but we still, in our churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, perpetuate the theories he built upon that world.
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