"Wars always lie. No war has the honesty to confess, I kill so I can steal.
Wars always invoke noble motives: they kill in the name of peace, in the name of civilization, the name of progress, of democracy. And, if so many lies weren't enough, the media is always ready to invert imaginary enemies to justify converting the world into a grand lunatic asylum and an immense slaugtherhouse."
"Until a few years ago, a man who had no debts was considered virtuous, honest and hardworking. Today, he's an extraterrestrial. Whoever doesn 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."
“By reason of his species and his manners, the peasant comes below the pig. He finds moral life profoundly repugnant. If by chance he achieves great wealth, he loses all sense. So you see, his pockets must be kept empty. He who fails to dominate his peasants only augments their vileness.”
“Sometimes the idol does not fall all at once. And sometimes when he breaks, people devour the pieces.”
"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.”
“Nos podrán quitar las flores, pero nunca la primavera. ""Richness in the world is a result of other people's poverty. We should begin to shorten the abyss between haves and have-nots."
"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."
"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."
"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 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?"
"The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture."
“The Nobodies
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping
poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on
them---will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn't rain down
yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a
fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their
left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right
foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the
no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life,
screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police
blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”
“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
Uruguayan journalist and writer
