Top 120 Eduardo Galeano Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity.”

— Eduardo Galeano

52. “I can’t sleep. There is a woman stuck between my eyelids. I would tell her to get out if I could. But there is a woman stuck in my throat.”

— Eduardo Galeano

53. “The purpose of torture is not getting information. It’s spreading fear.”

— Eduardo Galeano

54. “Where do people earn the Per Capita Income? More than one poor starving soul would like to know. In our countries, numbers live better than people. How many people prosper in times of prosperity? How many people find their lives developed by development?”

— Eduardo Galeano

55. “If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.”

— Eduardo Galeano

56. “And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.”

— Eduardo Galeano

57. “I’m a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.”

— Eduardo Galeano

58. “The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.”

— Eduardo Galeano

59. “I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.”

— Eduardo Galeano

60. “A pretty move, for the love of God.”

— Eduardo Galeano

61. “I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.”

— Eduardo Galeano

62. “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.”

— Eduardo Galeano

63. “Chaplin and Keaton are still the best. They know that there is nothing more serious than laughter, an art demanding infinite work, and that as long as the world revolves, making others laugh is the most splendid of activities.”

— Eduardo Galeano

64. “Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet the twilight.”

— Eduardo Galeano

65. “Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others.”

— Eduardo Galeano

66. “This work is a torture on the rump but a joy to the heart.”

— Eduardo Galeano

67. “The ball laughs, radiant, in the air. He brings her down, puts her to sleep, showers her with compliments, dances with her, and seeing such things never before seen his admirers pity their unborn grandchildren who will never see them.”

— Eduardo Galeano

68. “In this world of ours, a world of powerful centers and subjugated outposts, there is no wealth that must not be held in some suspicion.”

— Eduardo Galeano

69. “I am quite prehistoric, absolutely prehistoric.”

— Eduardo Galeano

70. “There are those who believe destiny rests at the feet of the gods, but the truth is that it confronts the conscious of man with a burning challenge.”

— Eduardo Galeano

71. “Hemos guardado un silencio bastante parecido a la estupidez.”

— Eduardo Galeano

72. “I would recognise myself in each of his translations and he would feel betrayed and annoyed whenever I didn’t write something the way he would have. A part of me died with him, a part of him lives with me.”

— Eduardo Galeano

73. “Soccer is a feast for the eyes that watch it and a joy for the body that plays it.”

— Eduardo Galeano

74. “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.”

— Eduardo Galeano

75. “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.”

— Eduardo Galeano

76. “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?”

— Eduardo Galeano

77. “It is highly improbable that the bureaucrat will put his life on the line. It is absolutely impossible that he’ll put his job on the line.”

— Eduardo Galeano

78. “When a book is alive, really alive, you feel it. You put it to your ear here, and you feel it breathe, sometimes laugh, sometimes cry, just like a person, a little person.”

— Eduardo Galeano

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

— Eduardo Galeano

80. “I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past.”

— Eduardo Galeano

81. “We Latins are known for jabbering on.”

— Eduardo Galeano

82. “There are some writers who feel they are elected by God. I am not. I am elected by the devil – this is clear.”

— Eduardo Galeano

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

— Eduardo Galeano

84. “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

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

— Eduardo Galeano

86. “Mis certezas desayunan dudas.”

— Eduardo Galeano

87. “If women were necessary, God would have one.”

— Eduardo Galeano

88. “17 January The Man who Executed God In 1918, in the midst of the revolutionary upheaval in Moscow, Anatoly Lunacharsky presided over the court that judged God. A Bible sat in the chair of the accused. According to the prosecutor, throughout history God had committed many crimes against humanity. The defence lawyer assigned to the case argued that God was not fit to stand trial due to mental illness; but the tribunal sentenced Him to death.”

— Eduardo Galeano

89. “Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good soccer. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: “A pretty move, for the love of God.” And when good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.”

— Eduardo Galeano

90. “The theories of Milton Friedman gave him the Nobel Prize; they gave Chile General Pinochet.”

— Eduardo Galeano

91. “In professional football, like everything else, the crime does not matter as long as the alibi is good.”

— Eduardo Galeano

92. “She’s on the horizon... I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking.”

— Eduardo Galeano

93. “Lying in the sun, he follows the unhurried paths of seagulls and sailboats, the azure breeze, the ebb and flow of foam on the water and in the air.”

— Eduardo Galeano

94. “La nostalgia es un perro perseguidor que le muerde los talones.”

— Eduardo Galeano

95. “For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.”

— Eduardo Galeano

96. “Esa realidad y esos libros muestran que el subdesarrollo latinoamericano es una consecuencia del desarrollo ajeno, que los latinoamericanos somos pobres porque es rico el suelo que pisamos y que los lugares privilegiados por la naturaleza han sido malditos por la historia.”

— Eduardo Galeano

97. “Throughout the history of humanity, only one refuge kept books safe from war and conflagration: the walking library, an idea that occurred to the grand vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, at the end of the tenth century. This.”

— Eduardo Galeano

98. “Our system is one of detachment; to keep silenced people from asking questions, to keep the judged from judging, to keep the solitary people from joining together, and the soul from putting together its pieces.”

— Eduardo Galeano

99. “Cada diez hombres hay un hijo de puta.”

— Eduardo Galeano

100. “FORBIDDEN TO BE CURIOUS Knowledge is sin. Adam and Eve ate the fruit of that tree and look what happened to them. Some time later, Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo Galilei were punished for having shown that the earth moves around the sun. Copernicus.”

— Eduardo Galeano