Richard Rodriguez Quotes

Go walk the streets of Beijing. It's pretty hard to argue it isn't a modern city. Now, if you go outside [of Beijing], in the rural areas, that's true. But rural America, you can say the same thing, in Appalachia there's an awful lot of poverty and lack of education.

To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.

I would be a president for all of the people, African- Americans, the inner cities. Devastating what's happening to our inner cities. She's been talking about it for years. As usual, she talks about it, nothing happens. She doesn't get it done.

We're also going to fix our inner cities. Forty-five percent of African-American children are - under the age six - are living in poverty.

Hillary Clinton's been talking about the inner cities for 25 years. Nothing's going to ever happen.

A lot of people don't know the culture shock of how you can be in a rich area and then be in poverty. People don't know how different it is over there.

My image of what a city should be - the super-rich and all the poor and desperate and the people who have some kind of a desire. It's a surviving game, people trying to survive on many different levels.

I love this city. If I'm elected, I will move the White House to San Francisco. I went to Fisherman's Wharf and they even let me into Allioto's. It may be Baghdad by the Bay to you, but to me it's Resurrection City

The way that you empower the poor to be able to live in those neighborhoods is not to just move them and give them something, give them the better neighborhood. You have policies that allow them to get out of the neighborhood permanently and afford that neighborhood through hard work.

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

Tower'd cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.

It would be a nice place if you took all the people out of the city.

Fifty percent of the world's population lives in cities. In a couple of decades, 70 percent of the world's population will be living in cities. Cities are where the problem is. Cities are where the solution is, where creativity exists to address the challenges and where they have most impact. This is why, in 2005, the C40 was founded, an organization of cities that address climate change. It started with 18 cities; now it's 91. Cities simply are the key to saving the planet.

Cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.

I love the people of Michigan. I'm fighting hard for them with the car industry. I'm constantly talking about the car companies moving out and going out Mexico and other places, Sean, and they know I will protect them. I will not let it happen. We're not going to lose our industries anymore.

There are so many cities in every single city.

I am weary seeing our laboring classes so wretchedly housed, fed, and clothed, while thousands of dollars are wasted every year over unsightly statues. If these great man must have outdoor memorials, let them be in the form of handsome blocks of buildings for the poor

The price of property in city centres is making it impossible, particularly in the big cities, for any kind of social mix to take place. It's castrating the whole notion of city life

Outside of Paris, there is no hope for the cultured.

I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified.

[At] the end of the day, when we talk about cities, we talk about a gathering of people. And we cannot see that as a problem.

Cities seldome change Religion only.

Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are termite hills left but no bush?

The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.