Samuel Ramos Quotes on Politics
Samuel Ramos's Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (1934) gave Mexican political philosophy one of its founding twentieth-century diagnoses of the cultural and psychological conditions under which post-revolutionary national life unfolds. The figure of the pelado — the urban underclass character whose aggressive bravado masks an underlying inferiority — supplies the analytical key, and the broader framework argues that the construction of an authentic Mexican political culture requires the systematic working through of the colonial inheritance rather than its denial under either an imported European universalism or a defensive nationalist particularism.
Quotes
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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:
“A people that knows itself can begin to free itself.”
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Attributed to Samuel Ramos:
“Imitation of foreign culture without self-knowledge is sterile.”
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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 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 -
“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