Guatemala's Quotes

#1. Guatemala's ornate presidential palace, once a terrifying fortress whose every corridor was patrolled by heavily armed soldiers in berets and camouflage uniforms, is now a normal public building where ordinary citizens enter without fear.

Stephen Kinzer

#2. On first acquaintance, the mystery of the Mayans of Guatemala can seem simply bizarre, as it was when I first encountered Maximon the god.

Nick Davies

#3. But I don't shut up and I don't die.
I live
and fight, maddening
those who rule my country.
For if I live
I fight,
and if I fight
I contribute to the dawn.

Otto Rene Castillo

#4. I wasnt privy to all of the intelligence that was coming in about Guatemala, but I did see the traffic that was coming in from Guatemala City, because it was very relevant to me, and of course I exchanged what I had with the chief of station in Guatemala City.

E. Howard Hunt

#5. What really terrifies Americans is the prospect that the Indian is very much alive, that the Indian is having nine babies in Guatemala, and that those nine babies are headed this way. This is one reason why Americans hold on so dearly to the myth of the dead Indian.

Richard Rodriguez

#6. There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.

John Negroponte

#7. On Aug. 19, 1953, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran became the first victim of a C.I.A. coup. Ten months later, on June 27, 1954, President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala became the second.

Stephen Kinzer

#8. I've been traveling in Guatemala in the rainforest, and here all these houses are made of sticks. It seems so easy to make one.

Bjork

#9. It's very hard to try to be a cultural ... people who organize cultural things ... it's very complicated. And more so in a country like Guatemala.

Luis Gonzalez

#10. All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.

Lynne Truss

#11. I have seen children shot in El Salvador, Algeria, Guatemala, Sarajevo, but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

Chris Hedges

#12. After installing friendly leaders in Iran and Guatemala, the United States lost interest in promoting democracy in either country.

Stephen Kinzer

#13. I wasn't the only orphan in Guatemala. There are many others, and it's not my grief alone, it's the grief of a whole people.

Rigoberta Menchu

#14. It is not possible to conceive a democratic Guatemala, free and independent, without the indigenous identity shaping its character into all aspects of national existence.

Rigoberta Menchu

#15. Guatemala commends the visionary decision of the citizens of Colorado and Washington

Otto Perez Molina

#16. Well, Colonel, there is diplomacy and there is reality. Our ambassador represents diplomacy. I represent reality. And the reality is we don't want you.

Stephen Kinzer

#17. If you do something and it proves to be a success, then people go 'get him to do that type of thing again, but only slightly different'. Either you do that or you go 'No! I want to play a leprous, lesbian dwarf from Guatemala!' But those parts just aren't coming to me.

Jack Davenport

#18. I could become very rich in Guatemala but by the low method of ratifying my title, opening a clinic, and specialising in allergies. To do that would be the most horrible betrayal of the two 'I's' struggling inside me: the socialist and the traveller.

Che Guevara

#19. We live in a capitalist system; anyone who believes they are above this system or purer than this system, even while shopping at the cute organic market across the street or taking a hiking vacation to Guatemala, is certifiable.

Katy Lederer

#20. I can tell you exactly where the economy is going. It's going to China, Honduras, Guatemala, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cipan, and any other place where you can pay people peanuts and have them work like dogs.

Henry Rollins

#21. Many instances of persecution and killing have occurred in countries with atrocious human rights records such as Sri Lanka, Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

David Suzuki

#22. I am a postmodern romantic. I try to use their way to photograph, and at the same time, incorporate the problems that I feel in a country like Guatemala.

Luis Gonzalez

#23. A British traveler remarked, 'There are [fashions in Guatemala] which it would require more than common charity to speak of with respect ... '
FILL IN YOUR OWN GRIPES! ;-)

Paul Theroux

#24. My son, who is five, was adopted from Ethiopia. My daughter was adopted from Guatemala. Her parents died of typhoid and malaria. We got her from an orphanage. They are the lights of my life.

Lisa Kristine

#25. The Indians are a marginal people in Guatemala just like I am a marginal person in the first world.

Luis Gonzalez

#26. Why were we so full of hope in those days? Looking back, I see so clearly that violence was worsening. Living through that time, we didn't see that. We believed in our capacity to grow a great country. A just society.

Kaimana Wolff

#27. I grow up in the States, in Miami, but I was born in Guatemala, and my father's Cuban, and in 'Body of Lies,' I played an Iraqi.

Oscar Isaac

#28. By the laws of the land, people who come looking for jobs in America are illegal. But by the laws of economics, they are following the logic and laws of economics when they leave Guatemala and go to Mexico, leave Mexico and come to the U.S., leave Africa and go to Spain and Europe looking for jobs.

Benjamin Barber

#29. What the United States wanted in Guatemala - and in Iran, where the C.I.A. also deposed a government in the early 1950s - was pro-American stability.

Stephen Kinzer

#30. More than half of Guatemalans are pureblooded Indians, descendants of the proud Maya-Quiche tribes. In their mist-shrouded villages, the Indians worship the corn god and the rain god, only vaguely concerned with the political entity known as Guatemala.

Stephen Kinzer

#31. This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it's the United States. Life will make a lot more sense, he said.

James Lee Burke

#32. You show me a tropical fruit and I'll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala.

George Carlin

#33. When you have a democratically elected president of Iran you don't topple him for the Shah. You don't help topple Arbenz in Guatemala. You don't do what we did in Vietnam, etc.

Matt Gonzalez

#34. The evidence is now clear that the majority of people coming across the border are not from Mexico. They're coming from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. Those countries are the source of the people that are now coming in its majority.

Marco Rubio

#35. Soft rock music isn't rock, and it ain't music. It's just soft.

George Carlin

#36. I went to Guatemala to help build a school but left wondering what "help" would really look like... I hadn't prepared myself for how humbled I'd feel, or how hard it would be to find my footing when witnessing a cycle of poverty that seemed to defy any sort of help.

Dee Williams

#37. Like Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Paraguay and others, Mexico believes that we should evaluate internationally agreed upon policies and search for a more effective and comprehensive response

Jose Antonio Meade Kuribrena

#38. El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras have all agreed to send additional consular officers from Guatemala, from Honduras, from El Salvador, send them to the U.S. border so that we can more quickly and humanely identify unaccompanied children and process their individual removal.

Joe Biden

#39. Sometimes I'd have breakfast in Guatemala and go to sleep in Mexico.

Adria Arjona

#40. The US has attacked countries like Grenada, Panama, Libya ... the list of victims of US terrorism is almost infinite. And the US government's participation in torture, whether in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile ... is well-documented and widely known.

Assata Shakur

#41. You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.

Werner Herzog

#42. I know about the torture and assassination, Detective Galiano. That's why I'm in Guatemala.

Kathy Reichs