Samuel Ramos Quotes
Samuel Ramos was a Mexican philosopher and one of the principal exponents of philosophy of lo mexicano, the reflective inquiry into the character of Mexican national life that flourished in the second quarter of the twentieth century. A pupil of Antonio Caso and a careful reader of Adler, he produced the path-breaking Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico in 1934, in which he applied the categories of Adlerian psychology to an account of the Mexican character marked by an inferiority complex inherited from the colonial period. The quotes below are attributed to Samuel Ramos, organized by topic.
Browse Samuel Ramos by topic
Samuel Ramos on Freedom
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Attributed to Samuel Ramos:
“A people that knows itself can begin to free itself.”
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“By those who stand aloof from us we are represented as grasping at wealth and territory, incapable of imaginative sympathy with subject races, and decking our misconduct with moral sentiments intended to impose on the world. From our own point of view, the extension of our rule is a benefit to the world, and subject races have gained far more than they have lost by submission to a just and beneficent administration, whilst our counsels have always, or almost always, been given with a view to free the oppressed and to put a bridle in the mouth of the oppressor.”
pp. 114-115
Samuel Ramos on Knowledge
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Attributed to Samuel Ramos:
“Education must form persons, not merely instruct minds.”
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Attributed to Samuel Ramos:
“The task of philosophy in Mexico is the recovery of the Mexican.”
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“The more of a student he is—and no one can be a historian without being a very devoted student—the more he is removed from that intimate contact with men of all classes and of all modes of thought, from which the statesman derives by far the greater part of that knowledge of mankind which enables him to give useful play to his imaginative power for their benefit.”
p. viii -
“Freeman and Macaulay are alike in the high value they set upon parliamentary institutions. On the other hand, when Macaulay wants to make you understand a thing, he compares it with that which existed in his own day. The standard of the present is always with him. Freeman traces it to its origin, and testifies to its growth. The strength of this mode of proceeding in an historian is obvious. Its w”
Letter to James Bryce , quoted in James Bryce, Studies in Contemporary Biography (1903), p. 274
Samuel Ramos on Mind
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“Unless the historian can feel an affectionate as well as an intelligent interest in the personages with whom he deals, he will hardly discover the key to the movements of the society of which they formed a part. The statesman, too, will be none the worse if, in studying the past, he is reminded that his predecessors had to deal with actual men and women in their complex nature, and if thereby he learns that pity for the human race which was the inspiring thought of the New Atlantis , and which is the source of all true and noble effort.”
p. x
Samuel Ramos on Nature
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“The statesman uses his imagination to predict the result of changes to be produced in the actually existing state of society, either by the natural forces which govern it, or by his own action. The historian uses his imagination in tracing out the causes which produced that existing state of society.”
p. viii
Samuel Ramos on Politics
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Attributed to Samuel Ramos:
“The Mexican lives in the shadow of an inferiority complex inherited from history.”
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Attributed to Samuel Ramos:
“Imitation of foreign culture without self-knowledge is sterile.”
Samuel Ramos on Time
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“To the historian no more interesting period can be found than one in which men of virtue and ability strove with one another in seeking the solution of the highest problems at a time when the old chain of precedent had been violently snapped, and when all things seemed possible to the active intelligence.”
p. vi