Eduardo Galeano Quotes That Will Change The Way You View Human History

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano will be best remembered for his 1971 cri de coeur “Open Veins Of Latin America,” in which he analyzed the effects of colonialism and imperialism in the region during the last 500 years.

The award-winning journalist and author died on Monday in Montevideo, El Pais reported. He was 74.

Galeano’s anti-imperialist work was published just two years before separate right-wing military dictatorships took hold of Uruguay and Chile, later followed by Argentina. “Open Veins” was banned in all three countries for over a decade, and its author was arrested and exiled from his native Uruguay.

Since then, Galeano has continued to write books with a clever look into human history, including “Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History” and “Mirrors: Stories Of Almost Everyone.”

In honor of the author’s memory, we’ve gathered 10 quotes that will inspire you to view human history and the written word in a different light:

 

In a 2013 interview with the Guardian.

2. "While we can’t guess what will become of the world, we can imagine what we would like it to become. The right to dream wasn’t in the 30 rights of humans that the United Nations proclaimed at the end of 1948. But without it, without the right to dream and the waters that it gives to drink, the other rights would die of thirst.”

Excerpt from “The Right To Dream.”

3. "In 1492 the natives discovered they were Indians, they discovered they lived in America."

Excerpt from “Children Of The Days.”

 

In a 2013 interview with the Guardian.

 5. "The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations.”

Opening to “Open Veins of Latin America.”

6. “I think the purpose of the writer is to help us see. The writer is someone who can perhaps have the joy of helping others see.”

Interview with Argentina newspaper, Clarín.

In a 2010 interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais.

 8. "One writes out of a need to communicate and to commune with others, to

 denounce that which gives pain and to share that which gives happiness."

 From “Days And Nights of Love and War."

9. “The human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty.”

In a 2013 interview with Democracy Now.

 

In a 2010 interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais.

 

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/13/eduardo-galeano-quotes_n_7054946.html