“Power, as it is, has a whole apparatus operating that goes about cutting down, closing doors, so that protests, exercises, platforms, and organizations, such as the Zapatistas, can’t grow further in the barrio.”

What is MTV doing and what is the hegemonic culture industry promoting in gangsta rap? It is the glorification of violence for the sake of violence.

MTV and the culture industry never are talking about community relevance, hood organization, they aren’t talking about ethical codes, they aren’t talking about forms of political organization, they don’t speak about codes inside the jails. What they talk about are superficial things.

I believe a lot in the subject of the power our own bodies have as marginalized beings to be able to change the sense of things.

So, we know who are the people that have the majority of power, access and privileges in Mexico, and they are white Mexicans.

If I stop today at a protest and I read a speech, it is a speech that remains in that moment, and whoever captures it does, and whoever doesn’t, doesn’t, and just keeps walking. It is very sterile, and it can seem even inaccessible and boring for a community.

The racial question, and thus class struggle, of course, I think they are processes which necessarily are intersecting all the time.

We have to remember that the experience of gangsta rap as such in its foundation is an anti-systemic experience primarily.

The whites have the responsibility to put themselves at attention with the form they operate in with people of color and try to always lay out that pattern to connect with people and say, “I am conscious of my privileges and I am accounting for myself.”

And those families for generations have maintained themselves in positions of power. Latin America founded itself on everyone being equal, but in reality we aren’t.

I think that in the colonial imaginary of the average Mexican, in how it drives us, the economic dependence on the US, and in some cases cultural dependence, is quite palpable, very strong.

I am conscious of how my body signifies in every space. In every place of the world our body has a different significance.

I don’t tan on my upper thighs, so when I first wore those [ cut-off jean short shorts] I look like I was walking on two cans of milk.

NASA is an engine of innovation and inspiration as well as the world’s premier space exploration agency, and we are well served by politicians working to keep it that way, instead of turning it into a mere jobs program, or worse, cutting its budget.

The number one killer of children in Rwanda is malaria. Since the United States of America stood up and working with Rwandans, we have been able to cut those deaths by two-thirds.

You don’t learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you’re not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.

The suburb is a place where someone cuts down all the trees to build houses, and then names the streets after the trees.

Yeah, I’m obnoxious, yeah, I cut people off, yeah, I’m rude. You know why? Because you’re busy.

There is no short cut to a place worth going.

We believe that there is one economic lesson which our twentieth century experience has demonstrated conclusively-that America can no more survive and grow without big business than it can survive and grow without small business…. the two are interdependent.