The 100 Best Phrases of Eduardo Galeano

I leave you the best Phrases from Eduardo Galeano , Undoubtedly one of the most incisive and influential journalists of his time and history. Born in Uruguay in 1940, he devoted most of his life to describing, through his essays, books and chronicles, the reality of an exploited and unprotected Latin America.

Filled with innumerable openly critical passages from governments, corporations, and systems governing the Western world, we have selected 100 phrases in the hope of drawing the skeleton of the central themes that make it up:

1. Throughout the history of mankind, only one shelter kept books safe from war and conflagration: the library of walking, an idea that occurred to the great vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, at the end of the tenth century . This.
2. All I know is this: art is either art or shit.
3. Is everything forbidden except the crossing of our arms? Poverty is not written in the stars; Â €"under developmentâ € | It is not one of the mysterious designs of God.
4. The story actually never says goodbye. The story says"see you later".
5. From 8:00 a.m. Until noon, I'm pessimistic. Then, from 13:00 p.m. Until 16:00 p.m., I feel optimistic.
6. If nature were a bank, they would have rescued her.
7. Every day has a story that deserves to be told, because we are made of stories. That is, scientists say that humans are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories.
8. I do not believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It extends from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. The other person is respected. I have much to learn from other people.
9. One writes to try to answer the questions that buzz in his head, tenacious flies that disturb sleep, and what one writes may take collective meaning when it somehow matches the social need for an answer.
10. 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 party.
11. We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.
12. Utopia is on the horizon. When drawing two steps closer, two steps are removed. If I proceed ten steps forward, it slides quickly ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach her. So what is the purpose of utopia? Make us move forward.
13. It is not necessary to know how to read and write to listen to the transistors radio or to watch the television and receive the daily message that teaches to accept the dominion of the strongest and to confuse the personality with a car, the dignity with a cigarette and the happiness with a sausage .
14. I can not sleep. There's a woman trapped between my eyelids. I would tell him to leave if I could. But there's a woman stuck in my throat.
15. I have never killed anyone, it is true, but it is because I have not had the courage or the time, not because I lacked the desire.
16. Each person shines with their own light. No two flames are the same. There are big flames and small flames, flames of all colors. The flames of some people are so quiet that they do not even blink in the wind, while others have wild flames that fill the air with sparks. Some fools or flames do not burn or shed light, but others burn life so hard that you can not look at them without blinking, and if you approach, you burn in the fire.
17. I am not particularly interested in saving time; I prefer to enjoy it.
18. The walls are the printing press of the poor.
19. There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with the writing of the book at its zenith. I disagree. I think all writing is literature, even graffiti.
20. I remember that, you know, I have not received a formal education. I was educated in Montevideo coffee, in the cafes of Montevideo. There, I received my first lessons in the art of storytelling.
21. 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 wars, have been trade wars.
22. 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 the money.
23. I am attracted to the beauty of football. When it is well played, the game is a ball with a ball.
24. Most wars or military coups or invasions are made in the name of democracy versus democracy.
25. The purpose of torture is not to receive information. It is to spread fear.
26. I am quite prehistoric, quite prehistoric.
27. A lot of leftists think it's because of football that people do not think, while most right-wingers are convinced that football is proof that people think with their feet.
28. Every time a new war is made known in the name of the struggle of good versus evil, those who die are all poor. It is always the same story, repeated over and over and over and over again.
29. I am surprised every time I come to the US, ignorance of a high percentage of the population, who knows almost nothing about Latin America or the world. They are quite blind and deaf to anything that can happen outside the US borders.
30. Even though professional football has become more about business and less about the game itself, I still think football is a feast for the legs that play it and for the eyes that watch it.
31. When it is authentic, when it is born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice. When you are denied a mouth, talk with your hands or eyes, or pores, or anything at all. Because each and every one of us has something to say to others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others.
32. In 1492 the natives discovered that they were Indians, discovered that they lived in America, discovered that they were naked, discovered that there was sin, discovered that they owed allegiance to one king and one kingdom of another world and one God of another heaven, and that this God had invented the guilt and the garment, and had sent to burn alive who worshiped the Sun, Moon, Earth and the rain that wet it.
33. If the past has nothing to say to the present, the story can go to sleep without problems in the closet in which the system maintains its old disguises.
34. Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; Our wealth has always generated our poverty to fuel the prosperity of others, empires and their native supervisors. In colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold is transfigured into junk and food into poison.
35. For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.
36. The great bankers of the world, who practice money terrorism, are more powerful than kings and quarterbacks, even more so than the Pope himself. They never get their hands dirty. They do not kill anyone: they just applaud the show.
37. In this world of ours, world of powerful centers and subdued suburbs, there is no wealth that is not, at least, suspicious.
38. More than in museums, where the poor are bored, the memory is in the air we breathe; And she breathes from the air.
39. There are those who believe that fate rests on the feet of the gods, but the truth is that it works, as a burning challenge, on the consciences of men.
40. The ball laughs radiantly in the air. He takes her down, puts her to sleep, bathes compliments, dances with her, and she seeing these things never seen before in her admirers, she takes pity on her unborn grandchildren, who will never see him.
41. And one day, the wind goddess kisses the man's feet, despised and mistreated, and from that kiss is born the idol of football. He is born in a straw crib, in a hut with a zinc roof and enters the world, clinging to a ball.
42. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and malandrines, all creatures of this wild reality, we had to ask a little imagination, because our fundamental problem has been the lack of conventional resources to make our life credible. This, my friends, is the knot of our solitude.
43. Chaplin and Keaton are still the best. They know that there is nothing more serious than laughter, an art that demands an infinite work, and that while the world turns, making others laugh is the most splendid of activities.
44. Human rights pale alongside the rights of machines In more and more cities, especially in the great metropolis of the South, people have been banished. Cars usurp human space, poison the air, and often murder the intruders who invade their conquered territory and no one moves a finger to stop them. Is there any difference between the violence of those who kill by car and those who kill with a knife or a bullet?
45. No story is mute. No matter how much they burn it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to close its mouth. The time that it was continues beating, alive, within the time that is, although the time that is does not want it or does not know it.
46. If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps it is the words that say what we are.
47. The reality is very, very contradictory, and that is why I try to write simply by perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a way to"feel of the thought". Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but above all feeling and thinking, in a language capable of tying the heart and mind, they have been divorced.
48. Always in all my books, I am trying to reveal or help reveal the hidden greatness of the small, the tiny, the unknown, and the pettiness of the great.
49. I am grateful to journalism for waking me up to the realities of the world.
50. Indignation must always be the response to indignity. Reality is not destiny.
51. Disasters are called"natural", as if nature were the executioner and not the victim.
52. Impunity requires demoralization.
53. Development is a voyage with more shipwrecks than sailors.
54. Power, they say, is like a violin. It is taken with the left and touched with the right.
55. The poet, distracted by politics, asks poetry for any useful action, such as metal or flour, to raise his face full of dust and charcoal and fight hand to hand.
56. Every two weeks a tongue dies. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and animals.
57. Writing is a wonderful adventure and demands a lot of work: those words run and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.
58. "Here,"an old sugar worker told me,"people feel a great love for martyrs, but only after they die. Before, there is nothing but complaints."
59. Do not you see? There were no records in paradise. The illness came after the doctors.
60. Murder for poverty in Latin America is secret: every year, noiselessly, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have grown accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.
61. All wars are wars among thieves too cowardly to fight, and they command others to die for them.
62. Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything from the discovery to the present has always been transmuted into Europe, or into the capital of the United States, and as such, has accumulated in the distant centers of power. Everything: the earth, its fruits, its depths rich in minerals, people and their capacity for work and consumption, natural resources and human resources.
63. If the iron curtain has melted, and the bad ones of yesterday are the good ones of today, why do the powerful continue to manufacture weapons and fear?
64. In the era of the Almighty Computer, the drones are the perfect warriors. They kill without remorse, obey without hesitation, and never reveal the names of their masters.
65. So many stories to choose which to count and how to count them. The words touch me on the shoulder and talk to me:"Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!"Stories choose me.
66. The world is becoming an immense military base, and the base is becoming a mental hospital the size of the world. Inside the crazy house, which ones are really crazy?
67. I wanted to be a football player, and I became the best of the best, number one, better than Maradona, better than Pele, and even better than Messi. But only at night, during my dreams. When I wake up, I realize that I have wooden legs and that I am doomed to be a writer.
68. 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, like a person, a small person.
69. The division of labor among nations consists in that some specialize in winning and others in losing.
70. The world is organized by the war economy and the culture of war.
71. Competing against silence is difficult, because silence is a perfect language, the only language that says without words.
72. Some authors consider that they are chosen by God. I do not. I was chosen by the devil, that is clear.
73. From their castle in Zurich, football owners do not propose but impose. That is his way.
74. I think the writer's purpose is to help see. The writer is someone who may perhaps have the joy of helping others to see.
75. This work (writing) is a torture in the rump, but a joy for the heart.
76. The history of football is a sad journey from beauty to duty. When sport became an industry, the beauty that springs from the joy of playing broke from its very roots.
77. The food of the minority is the hunger of the majority.
78. For the rays of love and hate flow through the thickest forests and the deepest rivers.
79. Prohibiting books has become unnecessary for the police: their price prohibits them by themselves.
80. I am a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering above all, the past of America, Latin America as an intimate land, condemned to oblivion.
81. The technocracy of professional sport has managed to impose a football of"speed of light"and brute force: a soccer match that denies the joy, kills the fantasy and forbids the daring.
82. Progress develops inequality.
83. We have a memory cut into pieces. I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humanity, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than this other rainbow.
84. On the way we even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although Haitians and Cubans had already peeked into history, as new peoples, a century before the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the shores of Plymouth. Now America is, for the rest of the world, nothing but the United States: we inhabit, at most, a sub America, an America of second class, nebulous identification.
85. Bacteria and viruses were the most effective allies.
86. Those who make objectivity a religion are liars. They are afraid of human pain. They do not want to be objective, that is a lie: they want to be objects, in order not to suffer.
87. If coca is banned because of the misuse of it, why is not television banned as well?
88. Religious disintegration began with colonization.
89. There is nothing more orderly than a cemetery.
90. The three inventions that made possible the Renaissance, compass, gunpowder and printing, came from China. The Babylonians advanced to Pythagoras for fifteen hundred years. Long before any other civilization, the Indians knew the world was round and had calculated their age. And better than anyone, the Maya knew the stars, eyes of the night, and the mysteries of time. Such details were not worthy of attention in Europe.
91. Every May first, everyone remembers them (of the workers). Over time, constitutions, laws and international agreements have shown that they were right. But in some of the most powerful corporations still have not heard. The unions are banned and follow up on the workday, with those melted watches painted by Salvador Dalí.
92. We live in a world that treats the dead better than the living. We, the living are questioners and respondents, and we have other grave imperfections by a system that believes that death, like money, improves people.
93. In our day, this global offensive plays a well defined role. Its purpose is to justify the unequal distribution of income between countries and social elites, to convince the poor that poverty is the result of children who do not avoid having, and to contain the rebellious advance of the masses.
94. We are what we do, especially what we do to change who we are.
95. The goal is the orgasm of soccer. And like orgasms, goals have become less and less common in modern life.
96. Other versions, however, insist that the"but"got stuck in the song. She sang:"I am black and I am beautiful".
97. Hunting for Jews has always been a European sport. Now the Palestinians, who had never played, are paying the bill.
98. The years have passed and I have finally learned to accept myself for what I am: a beggar for the good of football. I go around the world, with my hand extended, and in the stadium I ask:"A nice play, for God's sake." And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I do not give a damn what team or country does it.
99. Our effectiveness depends on our ability to be bold and cunning, clear and attractive. I would hope that we can create a bolder and more beautiful language than that used by conformist writers to greet twilight.
100. All that exists is the temple. In this sacred place, the only religion without atheists puts its divinities on the screen.

Frontal, critical and brutally honest. This is the work that Eduardo Galeano left throughout his professional life, which certainly began as a teenager, when at age 14 he published political cartoons in the socialist weekly"El Sol".

During his career he openly exposed his findings, denouncing the dictatorships of Argentina and Uruguay, as well as the exploitation of the rest of the Latin American continent from the time of the colony to what was his contemporary reality (1970 - 2015). "The Open Veins of Latin America"​​(1971),"The Song of Us"(1975),"Days and Nights of Love and War"(1978), Trilogy"Memories of Fire" And"Mirrors.

An almost universal story"(2008), are some of the most famous titles of the more than 30 literary works he published. In each of them, he explored and exposed the radiography of an exploited society, always from a point of view of left and documented denunciation.

Unconditional lover of football and defender of the most unprotected social groups of his country and the region in which he lived, until after his exile in Spain, Galeano became one of the most influential journalistic and literary figures in contemporary history.

Today, shortly after his death, it remains a must for any student of journalism, Latin American studies and anyone interested in world politics.