Richard Rodriguez Quotes

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

The Chinese began with the assumption that the group is the fundamental unit of reality. Individuals? Sure, we can factor them out from their groups, but let us not think that they as individuals have any viability apart from their group.

For traditional societies … the collective, the group, is more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the 'we' rather than the 'I.'

I don't really believe in the idea of the individual.

Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.

Our customs, behaviors, and values are byproducts of our culture.

In the West, the basic economic and social unit is the individual; in Africa, it is the extended family or the collective.

No man is an island. If you want to blame anybody for poisoning the world with that socialistic idea, blame John Donne.

To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That's all it is; culture is people's behaviors.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.

Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.

Culture is the air we breathe all around us.

I think we have a rawer version of capitalism and a more fragile community and family base than other nations. We are a more individualistic culture. From the Boston Tea Party on, we've had too little faith in government.

A society that is all self-interest and no comradeship is not a society at all. But a society that is all comradeship and no self-interest is also not a society; it is a sect - or, on the largest scale, totalitarianism.

A mind cannot be independent of culture.

Ants can live together in solidarity and forget themselves in the community. In a normative capitalist society, everyone is an egoist. In the ants' civilization, you are part of the group; you don't live for yourself alone.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

A public is a necessary fiction.

He who would dare to undertake to establish a nation would have to feel himself capable of altering, so to speak, human nature, to transform each individual, who by his very nature is a unique and perfect whole, into a mere part of a greater whole, from which this individual would in a sense receive his life and his being.

We are a people in search of community.

Culture is more important than politics.

Some countries elevate and value community. Some serve the state to the detriment of individual people, and some, like the United States, celebrate individuality to a fault.

We talk about "rugged individualism" and "personal liberty." My dear friends, both of those disappeared from the earth the day the first colony of cave men held a conference around a community fire.