Eduardo Galeano Quotes

In his life, a man can change wives, political parties or religions but he cannot change his favourite soccer team.

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.

In these lands we are not experiencing the primitive infancy of capitalism but its vicious senility. Underdevelopment isn't a stage of development, but its consequence. Latin America's underdevelopment arises from external development, and continues to feed it. A system made impotent by its function of international servitude, and moribund since birth, has feet of clay. It pretends to be destiny and would like to be thought eternal. All memory is subversive, because it is different, and likewise any program for the future. The zombie is made to eat without salt: salt is dangerous, it could awaken him. The system has its paradigm in the immutable society of ants. For that reason it accords ill with the history of humankind, because that is always changing. And because in the history of humankind every act of destruction meets its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation.

Until a few years ago, a man who had no debts was considered virtuous, honest, and hardworking. Today, he's an extraterrestrial. Whoever does not owe, does not exist. I owe, therefore I am. Whoever is not credit-worthy deserves neither name nor face. The credit card is proof of the right to exist; debt, something even those who have nothing have. Every single person or country that belongs to this world has at least one foot caught in this trap.

Today we must begin again. Step by small step, without any more protection than comes from our own bodies.

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.

The more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business.

It's a difficult competition against silence, because silence is a perfect language, the only language which says with no words.

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.

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

From 8 A.M. until noon, I am pessimistic. Then from 1 P.M. until 4, I feel optimistic.

Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European
or later
United States
capital, and as such has accumulated on distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits nad its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources.

To narrate is to give oneself: it seems obvious that literature, as an effort to communicate fully, will continue to be blocked so long as misery and illiteracy exist, and so long as the possessors of power continue to carry on with impunity their policy of collective imbecilization through the mass media.

I am not particularly interested in
saving time; I prefer to enjoy it.

The diversity of life is so stimulating for me.

The machinery of compulsory equalization works against the finest trait of the human species, the fact that we recognize ourselves in our differences and build links based on them. The best of the world lies in the many worlds the world contains, the different melodies of life, their pains and strains: the thousand and one ways of living and speaking, thinking and creating, eating, working, dancing, playing, loving, suffering, and celebrating that we have discovered over so many thousands of years. Equalization, which makes us all goofy and all the same, can't be measured. No computer could count the crimes that the pop culture business commits each day against the human rainbow and the human right to identity. But its devastating progress is mind-boggling. Time is emptied of history, and space no longer acknowledges the astonishing diversity of its parts. Through the mass media the owners of the world inform us all of our obligation to look at ourselves in a single mirror.

From their castle in Zurich, the owners of soccer do not propose, they impose. That's their way.

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

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.

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.

Soccer is a feast for the eyes that watch it and a joy for the body that plays it

All that exists is the temple. In this sacred place, the only religion without atheists puts its divinities on display.

An astonishing void: official history ignores soccer. Contemporary history texts fail to mention it, even in passing, in countries where soccer has been and continues to be a primordial symbol of collective identity. I play therefore I am: a style of play is a way of being that reveals the unique profile of each community and affirms its right to be different. Tell me how you play and I'll tell you who you are. For many years soccer has been played in different styles, unique expressions of the personality of each people, and the preservation of that diversity seems to me more necessary today than ever before. These are days of obligatory uniformity, in soccer and everything else. Never has the world been so unequal in the opportunities it offers and so equalizing in the habits it imposes: in this end of century world, whoever does not die of hunger dies of boredom.

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

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.

The family has no borders, explains Soboufu Somé of the Dagara people: "Our children have many mothers and many fathers. As many as they wish.

There are visible and invisible dictators. The power structure of world football is monarchical. It's the most secret kingdom in the world.

Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim.

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.

Our system is one of detachment; to keep silenced people from asking questions, to keep the judged from judging, to keep the solitary people from joining together, and the soul from putting together its pieces.

Development develops inequality.

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.

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.

We are the sum of our efforts to change who we are.

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.

I like Messi because he doesn't think he is Messi.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.

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.

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.

Fear These incredible bodies called to them, but the Nivakle men dared not enter. They had seen the women eat: they swallowed the flesh of fish with the upper mouth, but chewed it first with the lower mouth. Between their legs they had teeth. So the men lit bonfires, called to the women, and sang and danced for them. The women sat around in a circle with their legs crossed. The men danced all through the night. They undulated, turned, and flew like smoke and birds. When dawn came they fell fainting to the ground. The women gently lifted them and gave them water to drink. Where they had been sitting, the ground was all littered with teeth. (192)

Religious disintegration began with colonization.

Is the prosperity of a class really identifiable with the well-being of a country?

Hunting Jews has always been a European sport.
Now the Palestinians, who never played it, are paying the bill.

Celebration of the Human Voice
When it is genuine, when it is born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice. When denied a mouth, it speaks with the hands or the eyes, or the pores, or anything at all. Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others.

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.

The more the technocrats programme it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs: the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bow-legged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.

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.

History never really says goodbye. History says, 'See you later.'

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.

The purpose of torture is not getting information. It's spreading fear.

The Bear The day animals and the night animals got together to decide what they would do about the sun, which then came and went whenever it liked. The animals resolved to leave the problem to fate. The winning group in the game of riddles would decide how long the world would have sunlight in the future. They were still talking when the sun approached, intrigued by the discussion. The sun came so close that the night animals had to scatter. The bear was a victim of the general flurry. He put his right foot into his left moccasin and his left foot into his right moccasin, and took off on the run as best he could. According to the Comanches, since then the bear walks with a lurch. (132)

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?

The big bankers of the world, who practise the terrorism of money, are more powerful than kings and field marshals, even more than the Pope of Rome himself. They never dirty their hands. They kill no-one: they limit themselves to applauding the show.

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.

Don't you see? There were no doctors in Paradise. Disease came after doctors.

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.

The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots.

Any open net was an unforgivable crime meriting immediate punishment, and [Di Stefano] carried out the sentence by stabbing at it like a mischievous elf.

The Revolution, after discovering that it had confused the knife with the assassin, turned sugar, which had been responsible for underdevelopment, into an instrument of development. There was no alternative, born of Cuba's incorporation into the world market, to break the spine of that monoculture and dependence.

Pedro Algorta, a lawyer, showed me the fat dossier about the murder of two women. The double crime had been committed with a knife at the end of 1982, in a Montevideo suburb.

The accused, Alma Di Agosto, had confessed. She had been in jail more than a year, and was apparently condemned to rot there for the rest of her life.

As is the custom, the police had raped and tortured her. After a month of continuous beatings they had extracted several confessions. Alma Di Agosto's confessions did not much resemble each other, as if she had committed the same murder in many different ways. Different people appeared in each confession, picturesque phantoms without names or addresses, because the electric cattle prod turns anyone into a prolific storyteller. Furthermore, the author demonstrated the agility of an Olympic athlete, the strength of a fairground Amazon, and the dexterity of a professional matador. But the most surprising was the wealth of detail: in each confession, the accused described with millimetric precision clothing, gestures, surroundings, positions, objects.....

Alma Di Agosto was blind.
Her neighbours, who knew and loved her, were convinced she was guilty:
'Why?' asked the lawyer.
'Because the papers say so.'
'But the papers lie,' said the lawyer.
'But the radio said so too,' explained the neighbours.
'And the TV!

Lady Gough's Book of Etiquette, published in 1863, established some of the social commandments of the times: one must avoid, for example, the intolerable proximity of male and female authors on library shelves. Books could only stand together if the authors were married, such as in the case of Robert and Elizabeth Browning.

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

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.

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.

If women were necessary, God would have one.

I'm not asking you to describe the rain falling the night the archangel arrived; I'm demanding that you get me wet. Make up your mind, Mr. Writer, and for once in your life be the flower that smells rather than the chronicler of the aroma. There's not much pleasure in writing what you live. The challenge is to live what you write.

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.

We Latins are known for jabbering on.

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.

The Crocodile The sun of the Macusi people was worried. Every day there were fewer fish in their ponds. He put the crocodile in charge of security. The ponds got emptier. The crocodile, security guard and thief, invented a good story about invisible assailants, but the sun didn't believe it, took a machete, and left the crocodile's body all crisscrossed with cuts. To calm him down, the crocodile offered his beautiful daughter in marriage. "I'll be expecting her," said the sun. As the crocodile had no daughter, he sculpted a woman in the trunk of a wild plum tree. "Here she is," he said, and plunged into the water, looking out of the corner of his eye, the way he always looks. It was the woodpecker who saved his life. Before the sun arrived, the woodpecker pecked at the wooden girl below the belly. Thus she, who was incomplete, was open for the sun to enter. (112)

It has become unecesssary for the police to ban books: their price alone bans them.

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.

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.

Richness in the world is a result of other people's poverty. We should begin to shorten the abyss between haves and have-nots.

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.

Grown on a grand scale, sugar spreads its blight on a grand scale and today unemployment and poverty are these islands' permanent guests.

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.

I'm attracted to soccer's capacity for beauty. When well played, the game is a dance with a ball.

17 January The Man who Executed God In 1918, in the midst of the revolutionary upheaval in Moscow, Anatoly Lunacharsky presided over the court that judged God. A Bible sat in the chair of the accused. According to the prosecutor, throughout history God had committed many crimes against humanity. The defence lawyer assigned to the case argued that God was not fit to stand trial due to mental illness; but the tribunal sentenced Him to death.

What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. It's not there.

Advertising enjoins everyone to consume, while the economy prohibits the vast majority of humanity from doing so. The command that everyone do what so many cannot becomes an invitation to crime.

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.

Mosquitos There were many dead in the Nootkas village. In each dead body there was a hole through which blood had been stolen. The murderer, a child who was already killing before he learned to walk, received his sentence roaring with laughter. They pierced him with lances and he laughingly picked them out of his body like thorns. "I'll teach you to kill me," said the child. He suggested to his executioners that they should light a big bonfire and throw him into it. His ashes scattered through the air, anxious to do harm, and thus the first mosquitos started to fly. (174)

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.

Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-thinking language able to tie the heart and the mind, which have been divorced.

Indignation must always be the answer to indignity. Reality is not destiny.

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.

The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.

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.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Along the way we have even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although the Haitians and the Cubans appeared in history as new people a century befire the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the Plymouth coast. For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.

Many small people, in small places, doing small things can change the world.

Helena dreamed about the keepers of the fire. The poorest old women had stored it away in suburban kitchens and had only to blow very gently on their palms to rekindle the flame

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.