Top 100 Eduardo Galeano Quotes
#1. There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.
Eduardo Galeano
#2. Perfection shall remain the boring privilege of the gods, while our bungling, messy world every night shall be lived as if it were the last and every day as if it were the first.
Eduardo Galeano
#4. We live in a world that treats the dead better than the living. We, the living are askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people.
Eduardo Galeano
#6. Almost all wars, perhaps all, are trade wars connected with some material interest. They are always disguised as sacred wars, made in the name of God, or civilization or progress. But all of them, or almost all of the wars, have been trade wars.
Eduardo Galeano
#7. Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet the twilight.
Eduardo Galeano
#8. Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations.
Eduardo Galeano
#9. Less is always more. The best language is silence. We live in a time of a terrible inflation of words, and it is worse than the inflation of money.
Eduardo Galeano
#10. In this world of ours, a world of powerful centers and subjugated outposts, there is no wealth that must not be held in some suspicion.
Eduardo Galeano
#11. Bolivians die with rotted lungs so that the world may consume cheap tin.
Eduardo Galeano
#13. Always in all my books I'm trying to reveal or help to reveal the hidden greatness of the small, of the little, of the unknown - and the pettiness of the big.
Eduardo Galeano
#14. Latin America is part of the world which was for many years condemned to the system of power where intimidation had more strength than the vote.
Eduardo Galeano
#15. The dreams were off on a trip. Helena went as far as the train station with them. She bade them farewell from the platform, waving a handkerchief
Eduardo Galeano
#16. Don't you see? There were no doctors in Paradise. Disease came after doctors.
Eduardo Galeano
#17. My language is a feel-thinking language, feeling and thinking at once, that is why it is a celebration of life, and at once it is a denunciation of everything that is not allowed in life to be real life, it's plenitude.
Eduardo Galeano
#18. Soccer, metaphor for war, at times turns into real war.
Eduardo Galeano
#19. This work is a torture on the rump but a joy to the heart.
Eduardo Galeano
#20. From their castle in Zurich, the owners of soccer do not propose, they impose. That's their way.
Eduardo Galeano
#21. We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.
Eduardo Galeano
#22. For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.
Eduardo Galeano
#23. The food of the minority is the hunger of the majority.
Eduardo Galeano
#24. From 8 A.M. until noon, I am pessimistic. Then from 1 P.M. until 4, I feel optimistic.
Eduardo Galeano
#26. Here," an old sugar worker told me, "the people have a great love for martyrs
but only after they're dead. Before, there's nothing but complaints.
Eduardo Galeano
#27. If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.
Eduardo Galeano
#28. I have never killed anybody, it is true, but it is because I lacked the courage or the time, not because I lacked the desire
Eduardo Galeano
#29. Most of wars or military coups or invasions are done in the name of democracy against democracy.
Eduardo Galeano
#30. In the Age of the Almighty Computer, drones are the perfect warriors. They kill without remorse, obey without kidding around, and they never reveal the names of their masters.
Eduardo Galeano
#31. Today we must begin again. Step by small step, without any more protection than comes from our own bodies.
Eduardo Galeano
#33. Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.
Eduardo Galeano
#34. Hunting Jews has always been a European sport.
Now the Palestinians, who never played it, are paying the bill.
Eduardo Galeano
#35. The Spaniards owned the cow, but others drank the milk.
Eduardo Galeano
#36. In our day, this global offensive plays a well-defines role. Its aim is to justify te very unequal income distribution between countries and social elates, to convince the poor that poverty is the result of the children they don't avoid having, and to dam the rebellious advance of the masses.
Eduardo Galeano
#39. I am not particularly interested in
saving time; I prefer to enjoy it.
Eduardo Galeano
#40. In the struggle of good against evil, it's always the people who get killed.
Eduardo Galeano
#42. Every two weeks, a language dies. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.
Eduardo Galeano
#43. What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. It's not there.
Eduardo Galeano
#44. Good Health At the busstop a swarm of youngsters crowded on board. Loaded down with books and notebooks and other stuff, they filled the bus with nonstop chatter and laughter. Talking all at once, shouting, pushing, showing off, they laughed at anything and everything.
Eduardo Galeano
#45. [Garrincha] was the one who would climb out of the training camp window because he heard from some far-off back alley call of a ball asking to be played with, music demanding to be danced to, a woman wanting to be kissed.
Eduardo Galeano
#46. The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day
Eduardo Galeano
#47. I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past
Eduardo Galeano
#48. The Revolution is indeed living thorough the hard times of transition and sacrifice. The Cubans themselves have learned that socialism is built with clenched teeth and that revolution is no evening stroll. But afterall, if the future came on a platter, it would not be of this world.
Eduardo Galeano
#49. The Church says: the body is a sin.
Science says: the body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.
Eduardo Galeano
#50. Lying in the sun, he follows the unhurried paths of seagulls and sailboats, the azure breeze, the ebb and flow of foam on the water and in the air.
Eduardo Galeano
#51. Is the prosperity of a class really identifiable with the well-being of a country?
Eduardo Galeano
#52. The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.
Eduardo Galeano
#53. The more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business.
Eduardo Galeano
#54. The ball laughs, radiant, in the air. He brings her down, puts her to sleep, showers her with compliments, dances with her, and seeing such things never before seen his admirers pity their unborn grandchildren who will never see them.
Eduardo Galeano
#55. The purpose of torture is not getting information. It's spreading fear.
Eduardo Galeano
#57. I can't sleep. There is a woman stuck between my eyelids. I would tell her to get out if I could. But there is a woman stuck in my throat
Eduardo Galeano
#58. A unipolar world - one with only one power - makes sure that this space almost disappears. In a multipolar world this space multiplies. Therefore, there is nostalgia for a multipolar world.
Eduardo Galeano
#59. His legs have a mind of their own, his foot shoots by itself ... Roberto Baggio is a big horsetail that flicks away opponents as he flows forward in an elegant wave.
Eduardo Galeano
#60. There are some writers who feel they are elected by God. I am not. I am elected by the devil - this is clear.
Eduardo Galeano
#61. The world is becoming an immense military base, and that base is becoming a mental hospital the size of the world. Inside the nuthouse, which ones are crazy?
Eduardo Galeano
#62. I still have things to do. I met up with the stars, but I could not count them. I drew water from the well, but I could not offer it.
Eduardo Galeano
#63. I would recognise myself in each of his translations and he would feel betrayed and annoyed whenever I didn't write something the way he would have. A part of me died with him, a part of him lives with me.
Eduardo Galeano
#64. It is highly improbable that the bureaucrat will put his life on the line. It is absolutely impossible that he'll put his job on the line.
Eduardo Galeano
#65. I wanted to be a soccer player, and I became the best of the best, the number one, better than Maradona, better than Pele, and even better than Messi - but only at night, nighttime, during my dreams. When I wake up, I realized that I have wooden legs and that I'm doomed to be a writer.
Eduardo Galeano
#66. And the days began to walk. And they, the days, made us. And thus we were born, the children of the days, the discoverers, life's searchers. - GENESIS, according to the Mayas
Eduardo Galeano
#67. The human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty.
Eduardo Galeano
#68. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead, 'A pretty move, for the love of God.' And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle, and I don't give a damn which team or country performs it.
Eduardo Galeano
#69. Each time a new war is disclosed in the name of the fight of the good against evil, those who are killed are all poor. It's always the same story repeating once and again and again.
Eduardo Galeano
#70. Many small people, in small places, doing small things can change the world.
Eduardo Galeano
#71. The tree of life knows that, whatever happens, the warm music spinning around it will never stop. However much death may come, however much blood may flow, the music will dance men and women as long as the air breaths them and the land plows and loves them.
Eduardo Galeano
#72. The poet, distracted by politics, asks of poetry that it make itself useful like metal or flour, that it get ready to stain its face with coal dust and fight body to body.
Eduardo Galeano
#73. Throughout the history of humanity, only one refuge kept books safe from war and conflagration: the walking library, an idea that occurred to the grand vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, at the end of the tenth century. This
Eduardo Galeano
#74. The manager believes soccer is a science and the field a laboratory, but the genius of Einstein and the subtlety of Freud is not enough for the owners and the fans. They want a miracle worker like Our Lady of Lourdes, with the stamina of Gandhi.
Eduardo Galeano
#75. Recordar: To remember; from the Latin records, to pass back through the heart
Eduardo Galeano
#76. I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.
Eduardo Galeano
#79. I remember that - you know, I didn't receive a formal education. I was educated in the Montevideo cafe, in the cafes of Montevideo. There, I received my first lessons in the art of telling stories, storytelling.
Eduardo Galeano
#80. Those who make objectivity a religion are liars. they are scared of human pain. They dont want to be objective, it's a lie: they want to be objects, so as not to suffer.
Eduardo Galeano
#82. If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.
Eduardo Galeano
#83. The capitalist "head office" can allow itself the luxury of creating
and believing its own myths of opulence, but the poor countries on the
capitalist periphery know that myths cannot be eaten.
Eduardo Galeano
#84. Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim.
Eduardo Galeano
#85. We are all mortals until the first kiss and te second glass of wine.
Eduardo Galeano
#86. Grown on a grand scale, sugar spreads its blight on a grand scale and today unemployment and poverty are these islands' permanent guests.
Eduardo Galeano
#87. Even though professional soccer has become more about business and less about the game itself, I still believe football is a party for the legs that play it and for the eyes that watch it.
Eduardo Galeano
#88. I am grateful to journalism for waking me up to the realities of the world.
Eduardo Galeano
#89. The fiesta of soccer, a feast for the legs that play and the eyes that watch, is much more than a big business run by overlords from Switzerland. The most popular sport in the world wants to serve the people who embrace it.
Eduardo Galeano
#90. Here in the United States, corporations has human rights. And then why not - why not nature also, if corporations can defend themselves, saying, 'We have human rights?' Well, let's admit that nature also should be protected.
Eduardo Galeano
#91. There are visible and invisible dictators. The power structure of world football is monarchical. It's the most secret kingdom in the world.
Eduardo Galeano
#93. The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.
Eduardo Galeano
#95. Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.
Eduardo Galeano
#96. Each day has a story to - deserves to be told, because we are made of stories. I mean, scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories.
Eduardo Galeano
#97. I think the purpose of the writer is to help us see. The writer is someone who can perhaps have the joy of helping others see.
Eduardo Galeano
#98. A lot of leftists think it is soccer's fault that people don't think, while most rightists are convinced that soccer is a proof that people think with their feet.
Eduardo Galeano
#99. In his life, a man can change wives, political parties or religions but he cannot change his favourite soccer team.
Eduardo Galeano
#100. From the weak nations' point of view, it is better if there are many powerful countries then if there are just a few. The more concentrated is power, the fewer opportunities there are to move. Space for change, space for freedom to implement change is then very narrow; very small.
Eduardo Galeano
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