Eugenio Derbez Quotes

There is in our society a gulf opening up, a kind of cultural apartheid, between those who are brought up to feel our national culture is theirs, to take ownership of it, and enjoy the privileges of that, and those who are completely disfranchised, those - for example - who will never be taken to the theatre to see Shakespeare.

One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings.

The main barrier between East and West today is that the white man is not willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority.

From a young age, I was rubbing elbows with a very different kind of person and social class, and I felt a lot of tension and conflict in my identity because of that.

One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

I grew up with white parents, and until after college, it was a lot of confusion, especially because I grew up in an all-white area. So I never looked around and saw anyone who looked like me.

There's a lot of potential that goes unused in places like South Central L.A., a lot of brilliant, smart people who just don't have that chance to show it.

An American, a Negro... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

I know I'm representing the Library of Congress, all the people of the United States and, of course, the Latinos and Latinas as well.

'Crash' came from personal experience. I saw things inside me from living in L.A. that made me uncomfortable. I saw horrible things in people and saw terrible things in myself. I saw a black director completely humiliated, but the three people around me just thought it was funny. 'No,' I said, 'that is selling your soul.'

There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.

I always felt I was living in two worlds. One was the Mexican world, because nearly everybody I knew, relatives and cousins and kids in the neighbourhood, were Mexican. Then school was a different world. It was ethnically mixed.

Because, if I'm honest, people in the white world might be appalled, but in the black world, they're making myths out of me. And I know that ain't the life.

What after all am I. Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates black and white in America.

Although the race problem may seem to lie dormant at times, it continually exists, lives on and on and sometimes rages with all the fury of a jungle beast. It gnaws at the very vitals of our existence, in time it will sap our strength and destroy the greatness of our American way of life unless solved properly and permanently.

If it's hard for Blue America to see Red America as anything other than a bunch of dumb, racist rednecks; it's hard for Red America to recognize that many minorities are legitimately worried about what a Trump presidency means for their family.

Chicago's one of the most segregated cities in America. Everybody lives in their own silos and vacuums.

In America, if you say 'Chris de Burgh,' they won't have a clue, but they all know 'Lady in Red.'

College was where I got to actually experience the difference between black and white.

You always want what you can't have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born, I could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained.

The problem of racial difference in America - and in modern life more broadly - is always presented as an economic, political, biological or cultural problem. But I want to say that it's at least as much a philosophical and imaginative disaster.

London centre has a wealth of creative activity but there are parts of London where there isn't a cinema or where library provision is quite weak.

When I first got to Los Angeles, hip-hop music was a scary thing not only to white America but to middle-class black America.

From the streets of Los Angeles to the public schools of the Bronx, there is no state of the Union where Latinos are not becoming local leaders and responsible politicians.

I don’t believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A. you are referring to categories again.