Ricky Rodriguez

“I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Like so many other pathological personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impulse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders’ ingenious plan, or that Jacksonian democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about states’ rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions.”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people?”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America