Eduardo Galeano famous quotes

We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Love #Wine #Kissing

Each person shines with his or her own light. No two flames are alike. There are big flames and little flames, flames of every color. Some people’s flames are so still they don’t even flicker in the wind, while others have wild flames that fill the air with sparks. Some foolish flames neither burn nor shed light, but others blaze with life so fiercely that you can’t look at them without blinking, and if you approach you shine in the fire.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Fire #Light #Air

In 1492, the natives discovered they were indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and the dress, and had sent to be burnt alive who worships the Sun the Moon the Earth and the Rain that wets it.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Kings #Rain #Moon

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

#Philosophy #Medicine #Church

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

#People #World #Changing The World

Scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Bird #Atoms #Stories

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

#Book #Greatness #Trying

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

#Believe #People #Charity

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

#Saving #Enjoy #Saving Time

The walls are the publishers of the poor.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Wall #Writing #Poor

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

#Sleep #Eyelids #Stuck

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

#Running #Moving #Two

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

#War #Civilization #Names

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

#Real #Thinking #Feelings

Chaplin and Keaton are still the best. They know that there is nothing more serious than laughter, an art demanding infinite work, and that as long as the world revolves, making others laugh is the most splendid of activities.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Art #Laughter #Long

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

#Soccer #Team #Party

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Latin #Past #Land

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

#Jobs #Political #Lines

Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Forgiven #Deserve

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

#Challenges #Charity #Relation

Recordar: To remember; from the Latin records, to pass back through the heart
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Latin #Heart #Records

Schools teach ignorance.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#School #Ignorance #Knowledge

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

#Victory #Gold #Poison

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

#Lying #Two #Horizon

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

#War #Fighting #Names

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.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Men #Air #Blood

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

#Purpose #Information #Torture

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

#Football #Secret #World

The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#War #World #Culture

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

#Greatness #Rainbow #Racism

We are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are.
-- Eduardo Galeano

History never really says goodbye. History says, see you later.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Goodbye #Saying Goodbye

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

#Devil #Clear #Feels

If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Wine #Who We Are #Made

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

#Crazy #Military #World

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.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Punishment #Crime #Unforgivable

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.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Soccer #Sports #Running

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.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Sleep #Past #Goes On

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

#Soccer #Games #Balls

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

#Believe #People #Answers

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

#Suffering #Prison

From the point of view of the economy, the sale of weapons is indistinguishable from the sale of food. When a building collapses or a plane crashes, it?s rather inconvenient from the point of view of those inside, but it?s altogether convenient for the growth of the gross national product, which sometimes ought to be called the "gross criminal product."
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Views #Growth #Criminals

Nothing can be defined or derided on the basis of its origin. The important thing is what is done with it and how far a community identifies with something that symbolizes its favourite way of dreaming, living, dancing, playing or loving. This is the positive side of the world: a constant intermingling that produces new responses to new challenges. But because of forced globalization, there's a clear trend these days towards uniformity. This trend comes largely from the ever-greater concentration of power in the hands of large media groups.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Dream #Media #Hands

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

#Writing #Annoyed #Betrayed

In the struggle of good against evil, it's always the people who get killed.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#War #Struggle #People

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

#Desire

The poet, distracted by politics, asks of poetry that it make itself useful like metal or flour, that it get ready to stain its face with coal dust and fight body to body.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Fighting #Dust #Coal

Memory. My poison, my food.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Memories #Food #Poison

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.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Kings #Powerful #Dirty

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.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Writing #Heart #Reality

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

#Soccer #Sleep #Grandchildren

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

#People #World #Poverty

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

#Powerful #World #Wealth

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

#Believe #Destiny #Men

For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Memories #Wind #Departure

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

#Beautiful #Twilight #Effectiveness

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.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Media #Long #Giving

Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Mean #Warrior #Reality

We Latins are known for jabbering on.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Latin

This work is a torture on the rump but a joy to the heart.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Heart #Joy #Torture

Globalization has considerably accelerated in recent years following the dizzying expansion of communications and transport and the equally stupefying transnational mergers of capital. We must not confuse globalization with "internationalism" though. We know that the human condition is universal, that we share similar passions, fears, needs and dreams, but this has nothing to do with the "rubbing out" of national borders as a result of unrestricted capital movements. One thing is the free movement of peoples, the other of money.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Dream #Communication #Passion

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

#Winning #Division #Losing

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

#Coffee #Law #Fiction

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

#Soccer #Football #Kissing

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

#Reality #Destiny #Answers

I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Believe #Charity #Solidarity

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

#Book #Laughing #Littles

I am quite prehistoric, absolutely prehistoric.
-- Eduardo Galeano

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

#Soccer #Eye #Play

The Latin American cause is about all a social cause: the rebirth of Latin America must start with the overthrow of its masters, country by country. We are entering times of rebellion and change. There are those who believe that destiny rests on the knees of the gods; but the truth is that it confronts the conscience of man with a burning challenge.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Country #Latin #Believe

Development develops inequality.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Development #Inequality

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

#Soccer #Football #Feet

...because of forced globalization, there's a clear trend these days towards uniformity. This trend comes largely from the ever-greater concentration of power in the hands of large media groups.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Media #Hands #Groups

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Past #Scrapbooking #Remember

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

#Latin #Ignorance #America

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

#Lying #Ignorance #Mouths

Human rights pale beside the rights of machines. In more and more cities, especially in the great metropolises of the South, people have been banned. Automobiles usurp human space, poison the air, and frequently murder the interlopers who invade their conquered territory -and no one lifts a finger to stop them. Is there a difference between violence that kills by car and that which kills by knife or bullet?" (p.231)
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Differences #Space #Rights

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.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Eye #Hands #Voice

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.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Fall #Rain #Flower

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

#Country #Numbers #People

Soccer, metaphor for war, at times turns into real war.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Soccer #Real #War

A pretty move, for the love of God.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Moving #God Love

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

#Latin #America #Years

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

#Education #Past #Museums

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

#World #Way #Upside Down

I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: 'A pretty move, for the love of God.' And when good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don't give a damn which team or country performs it.
-- Eduardo Galeano

#Soccer #Country #Team