Top 120 Eduardo Galeano Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Many small people, in small places, doing small things can change the world.”

— Eduardo Galeano

Featured in: Impact Quotes, Changing the World Quotes, Quotes About Humanity, Quotes About People, Quotes About the World

2. “History never really says goodbye. History says, see you later.”

— Eduardo Galeano

Featured in: Past Quotes

3. “Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.”

— Eduardo Galeano

4. “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

5. “We are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are.”

— Eduardo Galeano

6. “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

7. “Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.”

— Eduardo Galeano

8. “No history is mute. No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.”

— Eduardo Galeano

9. “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.”

— Eduardo Galeano

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

— Eduardo Galeano

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Eduardo Galeano

12. “We live in a world that treats the dead better than the living. We, the living are askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people.”

— Eduardo Galeano

13. “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.”

— Eduardo Galeano

14. “If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?”

— Eduardo Galeano

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

— Eduardo Galeano

16. “I am not particularly interested in saving time; I prefer to enjoy it.”

— Eduardo Galeano

17. “Development develops inequality.”

— Eduardo Galeano

18. “Charity, vertical, humiliates. Solidarity, horizontal, helps.”

— Eduardo Galeano

19. “Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations.”

— Eduardo Galeano

20. “Somos lo que hacemos, pero somos, principalmente, lo que hacemos para cambiar lo que somos.”

— Eduardo Galeano

21. “Schools teach ignorance.”

— Eduardo Galeano

22. “The tree of life knows that, whatever happens, the warm music spinning around it will never stop. However much death may come, however much blood may flow, the music will dance men and women as long as the air breaths them and the land plows and loves them.”

— Eduardo Galeano

23. “Recordar: To remember; from the Latin records, to pass back through the heart.”

— Eduardo Galeano

24. “Most of wars or military coups or invasions are done in the name of democracy against democracy.”

— Eduardo Galeano

25. “I like Messi because he doesn’t think he is Messi.”

— Eduardo Galeano

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

— Eduardo Galeano

27. “I have never killed anybody, it is true, but it is because I lacked the courage or the time, not because I lacked the desire.”

— Eduardo Galeano

28. “Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others – the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.”

— Eduardo Galeano

29. “The world is a heap of people, a sea of tiny flames.”

— Eduardo Galeano

30. “If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are.”

— Eduardo Galeano

31. “The more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business.”

— Eduardo Galeano

32. “Latin America is part of the world which was for many years condemned to the system of power where intimidation had more strength than the vote.”

— Eduardo Galeano

33. “The walls are the publishers of the poor.”

— Eduardo Galeano

34. “Indignation must always be the answer to indignity. Reality is not destiny.”

— Eduardo Galeano

35. “Soccer, metaphor for war, at times turns into real war.”

— Eduardo Galeano

36. “There are visible and invisible dictators. The power structure of world football is monarchical. It’s the most secret kingdom in the world.”

— Eduardo Galeano

37. “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.”

— Eduardo Galeano

38. “In the struggle of good against evil, it’s always the people who get killed.”

— Eduardo Galeano

39. “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.”

— Eduardo Galeano

40. “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.”

— Eduardo Galeano

41. “Memory. My poison, my food.”

— Eduardo Galeano

42. “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”

— Eduardo Galeano

43. “I remember that – you know, I didnt receive a formal education. I was educated in the Montevideo cafe, in the cafes of Montevideo. There, I received my first lessons in the art of telling stories, storytelling.”

— Eduardo Galeano

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Eduardo Galeano

45. “The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret: every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.”

— Eduardo Galeano

46. “Vale la pena morir, por todo eso sin lo cual no vale la pena vivir.”

— Eduardo Galeano

47. “The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty.”

— Eduardo Galeano

48. “Todas las guerras son guerras entre ladrones demasiado cobardes para luchar, que mandan a otros a morir por ellos.”

— Eduardo Galeano

49. “A unipolar world – one with only one power – makes sure that this space almost disappears. In a multipolar world this space multiplies. Therefore, there is nostalgia for a multipolar world.”

— Eduardo Galeano

50. “For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.”

— Eduardo Galeano