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Eduardo Galeano Quotes

Eduardo Hughes Galeano was an Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist considered, among other things, "global soccer's pre-eminent man of letters" and "a literary giant of the Latin American left".Galeano's best-known works are Las venas abiertas de América Latina and Memoria del fuego . "I'm a writer," the author once said of himself, "obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia."Author Isabel Allende, who said her copy of Galeano's book was one of the few items with which she fled Chile in 1973 after the military coup of Augusto Pinochet, called Open Veins of Latin America, "a mixture of meticulous detail, political conviction, poetic flair, and good storytelling." Wikipedia  

✵ 3. September 1940 – 13. April 2015
Eduardo Galeano photo

Works

The Book of Embraces
The Book of Embraces
Eduardo Galeano
The Book of Embraces
The Book of Embraces
Eduardo Galeano
Eduardo Galeano: 12 quotes30 likes

Famous Eduardo Galeano Quotes

“We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content.”

Eduardo Galeano

“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

Galeano, in: David Barsamian (2004) Louder Than Bombs: Interviews from The Progressive Magazine. p. 146

“The results of civilization were surprising: our lives became more secure but less free, and we worked a lot harder.”

Eduardo Galeano

As quoted in Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2009), p. 17

“We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.”

Eduardo Galeano book The Book of Embraces

somos todos mortales hasta el primer beso y el segundo vaso
The Book of Embraces (1991)

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

Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Galeano (1973), as cited in: Riley E. Dunlap (2002), Sociological Theory and the Environment, 183

“p>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 on 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 crime reports of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”

Eduardo Galeano book The Book of Embraces

The Nobodies; Cied in Mother Jones Magazine (1991) The Book of Embraces. March-April 1991. p. 71
The Book of Embraces (1991)

Eduardo Galeano Quotes

“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.
Their officials, international technocrats, rule our countries: they are neither presidents nor ministers, they have not been elected, but they decide the level of salaries and public expenditure, investments and divestments, prices, taxes, interest rates, subsidies, when the sun rises and how frequently it rains.
However, they don't concern themselves with the prisons or torture chambers or concentration camps or extermination centers, although these house the inevitable consequences of their acts.
The technocrats claim the privilege of irresponsibility: 'We're neutral' they say.”

Eduardo Galeano

Galeano (1991) Professional Life/3 p. 108; As cited in: Paul Farmer (2005) Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor.. p. 10

“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

Galeano (1973) Vagamundo , p. 112

“The dominant culture of the world teaches us that The Other is a threat, that our fellow human beings are a danger. We will all continue to be exiles in one form or another as long as we continue to accept the paradigm that the world is a racetrack or a battlefield.”

Eduardo Galeano

as interviewed by Jonah Raskin, "Saying More with Less," Monthly Review, vo. 61, n. 5, October 2009.

“Scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories.”

Eduardo Galeano

Source: Democracy Now!, 8 May 2013, Eduardo Galeano, Chronicler of Latin America’s “Open Veins,” on His New Book “Children of the Days” https://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/8/eduardo_galeano_chronicler_of_latin_americas,

“He discovered or described hundreds of afflictions and cures, and by testing remedies he concluded “Laughter is the best medicine””

Eduardo Galeano

As quoted in Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2009), p. 64

“As the owners of heaven forbade chocolate to mortals, so the owners of earth forbade it to commoners.”

Eduardo Galeano

As quoted in Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2009), p. 7

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