Top 100 Galeano Quotes
#1. The fisherman of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, or 'feeling-thinking' to define language that speaks the truth. Eduardo Galeano
Rob Brezsny
#2. Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.
Rebecca Solnit
#3. Utopia is on the horizon," declares Eduardo Galeano. "When I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking." Judeo-Christian
Rebecca Solnit
#4. The technocracy of professional sport has managed to impose a soccer of lightning speed and brute strength: a soccer that negates joy, kills fantasy and outlaws daring.
Eduardo Galeano
#5. If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn't we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?
Eduardo Galeano
#6. It's a difficult competition against silence, because silence is a perfect language, the only language which says with no words.
Eduardo Galeano
#7. 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
#8. 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
#10. Where do people earn the Per Capita Income? More than one poor starving soul would like to know. In our countries, numbers live better than people. How many people prosper in times of prosperity? How many people find their lives developed by development?
Eduardo Galeano
#11. 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
#12. All that exists is the temple. In this sacred place, the only religion without atheists puts its divinities on display.
Eduardo Galeano
#13. I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.
Eduardo Galeano
#15. 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
#16. I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.
Eduardo Galeano
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Bolivians die with rotted lungs so that the world may consume cheap tin.
Eduardo Galeano
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Don't you see? There were no doctors in Paradise. Disease came after doctors.
Eduardo Galeano
#27. I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It's quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S.
Eduardo Galeano
#28. 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
#29. Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.
Eduardo Galeano
#30. Soccer, metaphor for war, at times turns into real war.
Eduardo Galeano
#31. This work is a torture on the rump but a joy to the heart.
Eduardo Galeano
#32. From their castle in Zurich, the owners of soccer do not propose, they impose. That's their way.
Eduardo Galeano
#33. And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.
Eduardo Galeano
#34. We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.
Eduardo Galeano
#35. If thats how it was done, and thats how it had always been done, there had to be a reason
Eduardo Galeano
#36. For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.
Eduardo Galeano
#37. The food of the minority is the hunger of the majority.
Eduardo Galeano
#38. So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.
Eduardo Galeano
#39. From 8 A.M. until noon, I am pessimistic. Then from 1 P.M. until 4, I feel optimistic.
Eduardo Galeano
#41. 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
#42. If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.
Eduardo Galeano
#43. 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
#44. Indignation must always be the answer to indignity. Reality is not destiny.
Eduardo Galeano
#45. Most of wars or military coups or invasions are done in the name of democracy against democracy.
Eduardo Galeano
#46. 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
#47. Today we must begin again. Step by small step, without any more protection than comes from our own bodies.
Eduardo Galeano
#49. 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
#50. Hunting Jews has always been a European sport.
Now the Palestinians, who never played it, are paying the bill.
Eduardo Galeano
#51. The Spaniards owned the cow, but others drank the milk.
Eduardo Galeano
#52. 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
#54. I know I can be accused of sacrilege in writing about political economy in the style of a novel about love or pirates. But I confess I get a pain from reading valuable works by certain sociologists, political experts, economists and historians who write in code.
Eduardo Galeano
#55. Whatever Latin America sells - raw materials or manufactures - its chief export product is really cheap labor.
Eduardo Galeano
#57. Soccer is a feast for the eyes that watch it and a joy for the body that plays it
Eduardo Galeano
#58. No history is mute. No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.
Eduardo Galeano
#59. I am not particularly interested in
saving time; I prefer to enjoy it.
Eduardo Galeano
#60. In the struggle of good against evil, it's always the people who get killed.
Eduardo Galeano
#62. We are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are ... In
this respect a "revolutionary" literature written for the convinced is just as
much an abandonment as is a conservative literature devoted to the ...
contemplation of one's own navel.
Eduardo Galeano
#63. 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
#64. What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. It's not there.
Eduardo Galeano
#65. 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
#66. [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
#67. The goal is soccer's orgasm. And like orgasms, goals have become an ever less frequent occurrence in modern life.
Eduardo Galeano
#68. 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
#69. I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past
Eduardo Galeano
#70. The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret. Every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.
Eduardo Galeano
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. We have a memory cut in pieces. And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow.
Eduardo Galeano
#74. There are those who believe destiny rests at the feet of the gods, but the truth is that it confronts the conscious of man with a burning challenge.
Eduardo Galeano
#75. 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
#76. Is everything forbidden us except to fold our arms? Poverty is not written in the stars; under development is not one of God's mysterious designs.
Eduardo Galeano
#77. When a book is alive, really alive, you feel it. You put it to your ear here, and you feel it breathe, sometimes laugh, sometimes cry, just like a person, a little person.
Eduardo Galeano
#78. Is the prosperity of a class really identifiable with the well-being of a country?
Eduardo Galeano
#79. The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.
Eduardo Galeano
#80. The more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business.
Eduardo Galeano
#81. 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
#82. The purpose of torture is not getting information. It's spreading fear.
Eduardo Galeano
#83. Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.
Eduardo Galeano
#85. Richness in the world is a result of other people's poverty. We should begin to shorten the abyss between haves and have-nots.
Eduardo Galeano
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are
Eduardo Galeano
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#100. 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
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