Quotes from Eduardo Galeano

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

I am grateful to journalism for waking me up to the realities of the world.

From 8 A.M. until noon, I am pessimistic. Then from 1 P.M. until 4, I feel optimistic.

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.

Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.

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.

There are some writers who feel they are elected by God. I am not. I am elected by the devil - this is clear.

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.

History never really says goodbye. History says, see you later.

The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

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.

What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. It's not there.

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.

Richness in the world is a result of other people's poverty. We should begin to shorten the abyss between haves and have-nots.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity.

Schools teach ignorance.

Every two weeks, a language dies. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.

I am quite prehistoric, absolutely prehistoric.

The more the technocrats programme it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs: the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bow-legged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.

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.

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

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.