The island of Puerto Rico is a small but complicated place. It's the only place in the world, I think, where you have a Latin American culture and you're an American citizen. I wrote a paper published by the University of Oklahoma's Department of Psychology about Puerto Ricans being like adopted citizens. I describe myself as an adopted citizen, much like a child who has been adopted by a family. He or she doesn't look like that family and longs to know who his or her parents really are. I was taught in the schools that Americans adopted Puerto Rico, it is not a real country. So, am I supposed to be forever grateful because someone adopted us and took us in? The Spaniards first, and then the United States? How does a child, then, form an identity?

If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.

What can properly be called a utopia?

We are trying to create a nation that has never before existed, of all the races, tribes, cultures and creeds of Earth, where all are equal. In this utopian drive for the perfect society of our dreams we are killing the real country we inherited — the best and greatest country on earth.

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but in the very least you need a beer.

A utopia or heaven on earth is a place where every would-be Mozart has access to a piano and violin before the age of five, where every would-be Beethoven is empowered to compose music in spite of deafness, where every individual can get quality education regardless of their socioeconomic status and place of residence, and where everyone is given good health and freedom to pursue their dreams.

We have for a long time hesitated to adopt and carry out the only principle which can solve that difficulty and give peace, strength and security to the republic, and that is the principle of absolute equality. We are a country of all extremes, ends and opposites. The most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world. Our people defy all the ethnological and logical classifications. In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name or number.

We need the nation of equal citizenship. We need a nation that fights corruption, a nation, a state where law rules, a nation where those who abuse their authority are questioned. We want to retrieve our nation, and we want to become citizens in a new world.

There will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.

They are not multi-national, but supra-national — above nations. They don't need any passports. They can go in and out of countries without permission from anyone.

In a composite nation like ours, as before the law, there should be no rich, no poor, no high, no low, no white, no black, but common country, common citizenship, equal rights and a common destiny.

You have to be a citizen of the world.

A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.

...and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation