Mo Rocca Quotes

I didn't learn black history in school. I had to go find Malcolm X books.

Guess what, Martin Luther King? I had a dream, too.

Happy Valentine's Day! And if this is news to you, my guess is you're probably alone. Valentine's Day is often times a, well, it's a manufactured day that really doesn't mean anything.

Valentine's day has gotten blown way out of proportion. Valentine's Day just used to be for your girlfriend or your wife but now everyone's like 'Oh, happy valentine's day!' I even got a Valentine's Day card from my grandmother. How ridiculous is that? We stopped having sex years ago!

I like Valentine's Day. The trouble is the florists and the candy-makers and the card people are all advertising so much, you don't dare let the day go by without making an offering, whether you mean it or not. Money exceeds affection.

That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

I would say that I put down a lot of the white American culture, and ways, and beliefs.

In my dream world gay people in America would get the right to marry, and not a one of them would use that right.

Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.

Transplanting the ballet to the United States is like trying to raise a palm tree in Dakota.

That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.

The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was.

My middle name is Nicole. It's so weird because my mom is from El Salvador, but my sisters and I have Irish names - Christy, Kelly, and Erin. And Christy and Kelly, they're not even girls' names! In Ireland, they're boys' names. And somehow, my mom was in El Salvador dreaming about Shamrocks before we were born.

The melting-pot idea is futile ... The brew in a melting pot is always boiling over.

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.

I'm half-Mexican - get used to it 'cause in about five to 10 years, you're all gonna be related to one. Whether you like it or not, no matter how much you prepared your family, you're gonna show up at Thanksgiving one of these years, you're gonna walk in and say, 'Hey! What's happening? Since when did we start serving flan?' Well, what's happening is that somebody's boning a Latino.

There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality.

But only in their dreams can men be truly free. It was always thus and always thus will be.

Jesus died for your sins. I'm doing it for your mere entertainment dollar.

I loved this idea of always being a foreigner. There's this thing where people bring cultures, bring the music together. I love it when the music, when the cultures collide and something sort of new comes out of it.

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

In America, anyone can become president. That's the problem.

I think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don't think we can carry our cultures through the keyhole of the stretch of the next millennium

Each wave of immigrants that have come in have been able to assimilate, integrate and then rise up and become part of this great American Dream.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, "The trouble with this country is...."