Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico's great federalist and apologist, has coined a wonderful term, la raza cósmica, "the cosmic race," a new people having not one race but many in their blood.

So many of my friends tell me they’re not religious. I’m like, Of course you’re religious. You watch Oprah Winfrey, don’t you?

But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.

Education is that human process of feeling your body mature, feeding your mind with ideas that it never had before, or information you never had. You simply cannot do that on a computer.

There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.

A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn't forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

Language is a social event.

You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That is not Mexico; that is some crude Americanism you have absorbed.

Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family's language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home.

The most amazing speeches are a mix of fear, expertise, and practice.

I've made all my money on my own without my family and I work very hard.

If you are supposed to be villainous and have some sort of agenda, I like the idea of delivering that kind of character in a perfectly well-mannered way.

She’s a smart woman. I love that. Intelligence is a wonderful and powerful aphrodisiac. To me, it enhances beauty, makes an ordinary woman look like a movie star.

Might was the measure of right.

Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument.

You can't imbibe someone's success by f*cking them.

We love action and adventure, but we use it to go out and start wars and kill people.

How much to learn if we could spend one hour, spend twenty minutes, with the us we will become! How much could we say to the us we were.

All that matters to me now is my family.