At age 14, he began selling his first political cartoons to Montevideo newspapers. He also worked as a laborer, typist and bank teller, but in the 1960s he began his journalistic career with the maxim that nothing human would be indifferent to him. It was Eduardo Galeano.
And he kept his promise. In 1971, at the age of 31, he published “The Open Veins of Latin America” a censored book that would become a classic in Latin American political literature. However, after the coup d’etat of 1973 in Uruguay, he had to move to Argentina and then to Spain.
Those experiences would mark him, making him transcend journalism to get into fiction, history and, of course, social analysis. He also put a lot of his part: he knew how to search in the depths of the human soul to weave words that shake the soul abruptly and without warning.
In fact, someone said that he was a collector of small stories that he gave away as if they were sweeties that he kept in the pockets of his pants.
His life went out one day like today, three years ago, so there is no better time to remember some of the Eduardo Galeano quotes that will touch your heart.
Eduardo Galeano quotes about life, society and our place in the world
- “Many small people, in small places, doing small things, can change the world”.
- “Each person shines with its own light among all the others. There are not two equal fires. There are large fires and small fires and fires of all colors”.
- “After all, we are what we do to change what we are”.
- “The world is divided, above all, between unworthy and outraged, and everyone will know which side they want or can be…”
- “Cultured is not who reads many books. Cultured is that one capable of listening to the other”.
- “We are definitely in the culture of the container. The marriage contract matters more than love, the funeral more than the dead one, the clothes more than the body and the mass more than God”.
- “If I fell it’s because I was walking. And walking is worth, although you fall”.
- “The moral code of the end of the millennium does not condemn injustice, but failure”.
- “Hopefully we can have the courage to be alone, and the courage to risk being together”.
- “Utopia is on the horizon, I walk two steps, she walks two steps away, I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further, no matter how much I walk, I will never reach her. So, what is utopia for? For that, she serves to walk”.
- “In a world of plastic and noise, I want to be muddy and silent”.
- “Free are those who think, not those who obey. Teaching is teaching to doubt”.
- “In order not to be dumb, you have to start by not being deaf”.
- “There is a unique place where yesterday and today meet and recognize each other and embrace each other. That place is tomorrow”.
- “The only certainties worthy of faith are those who eat doubts for breakfast every morning”.
- “Charity is humiliating because it is exercised vertically and from above; solidarity is horizontal and implies mutual respect”.
- “The world upside down teaches us to suffer reality instead of changing it, to forget the past instead of listening to it and accepting the future instead of imagining it. The classes of impotence, amnesia and resignation are compulsory at school”.
- “The civilization that confuses clocks with time, growth with development and the grandeur with big, also confuses nature with landscape, while the world, labyrinth without a center, is dedicated to breaking its own sky”.
- “Those who are not prisoners of the need, are prisoners of fear: some do not sleep because of the anxiety of having things that they do not have, and others do not sleep for the panic of losing the things they have…”
- “It is the trees that bear fruit that suffer the stones”.
One last sentence by Eduardo Galeano, which practically takes the nuance of advice or reminder: “The automobile, the television, the video recorder, the personal computer, the cell phone and all the other passwords of happiness, machines born to ‘gain time’ or ‘spend time’, they take over time”.
