Top 38 Ingrid Betancourt Quotes
#1. I think that for example as a prisoner of course I was pressured to become very submissive and in a way the syndrome of Stockholm is when you shift position and then you become like you're supposed to act, which is accepting the authority of those who have abducted you.
Ingrid Betancourt
#2. I knew of no instruction manual for reaching a higher level of humanity and a greater wisdom. But I felt intuitively that laughter was the beginning of wisdom, as is was indispensable for survival.
Ingrid Betancourt
#3. I realized that I hated politics. I mean that is you know ... I realized being in the jungle that what I had thought I could do, I mean changing the way politics were being done in Colombia, was not possible the way I wanted to do it - by confronting, by denouncing.
Ingrid Betancourt
#5. He wasn't alive because he feared death. He was alive because he loved life.
Ingrid Betancourt
#6. In Colombia today we have 16% of the population, which is a very small amount of the population owning 90% of the land and 20 years ago it wasn't like that.
Ingrid Betancourt
#7. Whatever you could do with your hands was important because it kept you in a motion of being able to produce something, and producing something kept you balanced in a way.
Ingrid Betancourt
#8. He looked at the world from above. Where I saw threatening waves, he saw tranquil water.
Ingrid Betancourt
#9. Once you don't have freedom and you're obliged to do many things you don't want, and it becomes a routine, then your identity is at stake because you can feel that you are not anymore yourself, that you are what they want you to be - and you can lose yourself.
Ingrid Betancourt
#10. After six years without seeing one, I love just seeing a smile - every smile I see gives me hope.
Ingrid Betancourt
#12. I told myself that I'd had life too easy, conditioned by an upbringing where fear of change was disguised as caution.
Ingrid Betancourt
#14. He who could hear my heart knew that I was crying out for help.
Ingrid Betancourt
#15. I had not suffered enough to find the rage in my guts I needed to struggle to death for my freedom.
Ingrid Betancourt
#16. I was struggling against corruption and the only thing ... my only weapon was to put the truth in the medias and of course it made me win lots of enemies that didn't want me to just denounce what was happening.
Ingrid Betancourt
#17. Before I was abducted, I think that happiness was related to success. Nowadays happiness is related, for me, to rest, peace, serenity.
Ingrid Betancourt
#18. What we have in Colombia is a war against the poor and the guerillas from the left side are against the poor.
Ingrid Betancourt
#19. I think that the security in the cities is a lot better, but I think that outside the cities the peasants have no security, have no protection of the justice, so that I think is something we have to address.
Ingrid Betancourt
#20. Nothing that I can encounter today can be as bad as what is behind me. There are small things that used to upset me, but now I just think: Who cares?
Ingrid Betancourt
#21. I was discovering that the most precious gift someone can give us is time, because what gives time its value is death.
Ingrid Betancourt
#22. I think there is limits to the assumption that wherever you are, the situation in a way tells you how to behave.
Ingrid Betancourt
#23. I already knew that I had the ability to free myself from hatred, and I viewed this as my most significant conquest.
Ingrid Betancourt
#24. But the Indians gesture touched me. It was nothing, but it was everthing. It took so little to mane a difference.
Ingrid Betancourt
#25. I no longer knew whether it was raindrops or my own tears that were flowing down my cheeks, and I hated to have to drag along this relic of a sniveling child.
Ingrid Betancourt
#26. It is said that the compensation for the effort courage, tenacity, and endurance displayed during the journey was not happiness. Nor glory. What God offered as a reward was only rest.
Ingrid Betancourt
#28. I often think about her. One thing she said stayed with me, a dagger in my heart: "You know for me the most horrible thing of all is knowing that he will forget me."
I lacked the presence of mind to tell her that it was impossible; she was simply unforgettable.
Ingrid Betancourt
#29. I think there is this sensation of being deprived of something that you are entitled to have.
Ingrid Betancourt
#30. Hostages want to survive - they are very focused on their own little view of things.
Ingrid Betancourt
#31. It's important for me to fight for principles. But I am not willing to cope with the nastiness of politics anymore and the endless destructive confrontations that it leads to.
Ingrid Betancourt
#32. Our life capital is measured in seconds. Once those seconds are gone, we never get them back!
Ingrid Betancourt
#33. In this condition of the most devastating humiliation, I still possessed the most precious of liberties, that no-one could take away from me: that of deciding who I wanted to be.
Ingrid Betancourt
#34. Sometimes I'm fragile, sometimes too emotional, but I'm putting everything I can on my side to be a happy person.
Ingrid Betancourt
#35. I was beginning to think that in life there might be some suffering that was worth enduring.
Ingrid Betancourt
#36. Sometimes you hear in the United States that in Columbia there is a war between rich and poor, between people that are defending the poor and the rich.
Ingrid Betancourt
#38. Now I realized that life supplies us with everything we need for the journey. Everything I had acquired either actively or passively, everything I had learned either voluntarily or by osmosis, was coming back to me as the real riches of my life, even though I had lost everything.
Ingrid Betancourt
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