Ingrid Betancourt Quotes

Our life capital is measured in seconds. Once those seconds are gone, we never get them back!

People need space to survive.

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.

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.

I already knew that I had the ability to free myself from hatred, and I viewed this as my most significant conquest.

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.

Sometimes I'm fragile, sometimes too emotional, but I'm putting everything I can on my side to be a happy person.

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.

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.

If you begin to have a relationship where you're doing what the guards want, and once you're out you will see that as a treason, a treason to your country, a treason to yourself, a treason to everybody, so you have to be very cautious on what is the perspective you're looking at yourself, and you have always to see yourself like from the outside.

I was discovering that the most precious gift someone can give us is time, because what gives time its value is death.

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.

After six years without seeing one, I love just seeing a smile - every smile I see gives me hope.

He wasn't alive because he feared death. He was alive because he loved life.

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.

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.

If you believe what you say, words become reality.

For me the very important thing was never to forget that they had no right to have me there, that my duty was to escape and that I needed to get back to my family and to my children no matter what. And that I could not accept to just see them as an authority, that I had to always keep in mind that I had to rebel and to keep my distance and to protect my soul because the core of the problem is dignity.

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?

If my goal is to change Colombia, which it is because I really think Columbia has to change in many, many ways - I think it has to be a very profound, nearly spiritual maturing process in the Colombian society because I think you have to first be aware of what's happening and it's not easy because many people don't want to see what's happening.

I am alone. I am here. No one is watching me. In these hours of silence that I cherish, I talk to myself and reflect. That past, entrenched in time, motionless and infinite, has vanished onto thin air. None of it remains. Why, therefore, am I hurting so much? Why did I bring back with me this nameless pain? I followed the path I set for myself, and I have forgiven. I do not want to be chained to hatred or resentment. I want to have the right to live in peace.

He who could hear my heart knew that I was crying out for help.

There are things that are more important than life.

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.

The book in my hands became my trusted companion. What was written there had so much power that it forced me to stop avoiding myself, to make my own choices as well. And through some sort of vital intuition, I understood that I had a long way to go, that it would bring about a profound transformation within me, even though I could not determine it's essence, or its scope. In that book there was a voice, and behind that voice threw was an intelligence that sought to establish contact with me. It was not merely the company of written words that distiller my boredom. It was a living voice, speaking. To me.

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.

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.

There was humiliations, cruelty, abuse, violence. And they were all the time trying to put to fight the prisoners one against the other, filling us with wrong information about the others or giving privileges to some so that the others would feel jealous and would react. And I could see how they were manipulating us.

If you believe what you say, words will become reality.

I told myself that I'd had life too easy, conditioned by an upbringing where fear of change was disguised as caution.

Hostages want to survive - they are very focused on their own little view of things.