Ritchie Torres Quotes

Ritchie Torres

Profession : Politician

Birth : March 12, 1988

Whether it's public housing, or project based Section 8, or mandatory inclusionary housing, or rent regulated housing, there should be a national strategy for maximizing the amount of social housing in the United States.

Ritchie Torres

I was raised by a single mother who raised children on minimum wage.

Ritchie Torres

I lived in public housing and had to struggle with depression and substance abuse.

Ritchie Torres

I never thought life would take me on a journey from the Bronx to Washington, D.C.

Ritchie Torres

What does it say about our society that we invest more in a golf course than the homes of Black and brown Americans?

Ritchie Torres

My father was born in Puerto Rico.

Ritchie Torres

My story is the story of the Bronx, a story of overcoming.

Ritchie Torres

There are people who have nothing else in common with me who have approached me and said, 'Thank you for telling your story, because I've had the same struggles.'

Ritchie Torres

I've had family members entangled with the criminal justice system.

Ritchie Torres

I've had to face housing insecurity and food insecurity.

Ritchie Torres

There were moments when we could not afford to have three meals a day. My mother would lurch from one low-wage job to the next. And so, our income varied widely.

Ritchie Torres

It's painful to see people you love who are the leaders of your family, the strong matriarchs of your family, struggle in their final years and become shadows of their former selves. And it's part of the reason I feel so strongly about home care. I want for every elder in America what I would want for my own grandmother.

Ritchie Torres

As a child of the Bronx who grew up in the projects, I was often too scared to come out of the closet, too blinded to see clearly my own value, my own equality.

Ritchie Torres

My younger self could not imagine standing on the floor of Congress as a member of Congress voting on legislation that, if enacted, would make me equal in the eyes of the law.

Ritchie Torres

Whenever I'm about to enter a new setting - like the New York City Council in 2014 or Congress in 2021 - I never have the luxury of taking acceptance for granted. My life experience has taught me this.

Ritchie Torres

I often wonder: Will I be accepted for who I am? A gay man, an Afro-Latino, a millennial sometimes surrounded by older colleagues with more experience?

Ritchie Torres

I am both black and Latino - there's no need to artificially barricade one from the other.

Ritchie Torres

Racial identity is chosen and given. It is as much a product of the world's perception of you as it is of your own conception of yourself.

Ritchie Torres

Exercising dominion over Puerto Rico, as the U.S. has done for more than a century - without granting Puerto Ricans the full franchise in federal elections - is the essence of colonialism.

Ritchie Torres

A comprehensive decolonization of Puerto Rico is long overdue.

Ritchie Torres