José Mujica

So I salute the efforts and agreements being made. And I will adhere to them, as a ruler. I know some things I’m saying are not easy to digest. But we must realize that the water crisis and the aggression to the environment is not the cause. The cause is the model of civilization that we have created. And the thing we have to re-examine is our way of life.

If the power of humankind is focused on what is essential, it is infinite.

Truly productive capitalism is a prisoner of the banks, which are at the summit of global power.

It is possible to eliminate poverty from the planet. It is possible to create stability. It will be possible for future generations, if they begin to reason as a species and not just as individuals...

I have the duty to fight for tolerance for those who are different and with whom we have differences and disagreements. We do not need tolerance for those with whom we agree. Tolerance is the foundation of peaceful coexistence, understanding that we are all different in this world.

Today, man does not govern the forces he has unleashed, but rather, it is these forces that govern man; and life. Because we do not come into this planet simply to develop, just like that, indiscriminately. We come into this planet to be happy. Because life is short and it slips away from us. And no material belonging is worth as much as life, and this is fundamental.But if life is going to slip through my fingers, working and over-working in order to be able to consume more, and the consumer society is the engine-because ultimately, if consumption is paralyzed, the economy stops, and if you stop economy, the ghost of stagnation appears for each one of us, but it is this hyper-consumption that is harming the planet. And this hyper-consumption needs to be generated, making things that have a short useful life, in order to sell a lot. Thus, a light bulb cannot last longer than 1000 hours. But there are light bulbs that last 100,000 hours! But these cannot be manufactured, because the problem is the market, because we have to work and we have to sustain a civilization of “use and discard”, and so, we are trapped in a vicious cycle. These are problems of a political nature, which are showing us that it’s time to start fighting for a different culture.

We must achieve a broad planetary consensus to unleash solidarity among the most oppressed and to punish and tax waste and speculation by mobilizing the large economies not to produce disposable goods, but rather useful goods without planned obsolescence or excess, which would help the world’s poorest peoples. Useful goods could stand against world poverty.

I am greatly anguished by the future that I will not see, and to which I have committed myself. Yes, it is possible to have a world with better humankind, but perhaps today the main task is to save life...

Liberalism has the idea that democracy is its invention, that liberalism had to come about for democracy to exist... Democracy is old, very old; it is an attitude of man… Democracy is an imminent attitude, but one that has always been in crisis with authoritarianism. So democracy can never be considered to be finished or perfect, the end of history does not exist, historical steps exist. Maybe today conditions are being created--thanks to digital mass-communication—that are going to foreshadow a kind of democracy that today we cannot imagine.

Anyone who looks at a map to say that Venezuela could be a threat has to be quite mad. Venezuelans have a marvelous Constitution – the most audacious in all of Latin America.

Going from one adventure to another, politics achieves little more than perpetuating itself, and as such it delegates its power and spends its time bewildered, fighting for the Government. Out of control, human history marches forward, buying and selling everything and innovating in order to negotiate what is, in a way, non-negotiable...

Today, the world is incapable of establishing global regulations for the planet, due to the failure of lofty global politics, which meddles with everything.

Bourgeois democracy: I defend it and I criticise it. What do I criticise? That it promises a degree of equality that it does not fulfill in practice.. If democracy has to represent the majority, as a symbol I understand that those who have the highest responsibilities should live as the majority does, not the minority. We have become feudal and the monarchy has come back in a different form.Bold text Presidents—the red carpet, those who play cornets, vassals on the bridge, all this paraphernalia which is not republican, because republics came into the world to reaffirm this: that men are basically equal.

I bear upon my shoulders the indigenous cultures, the remains of colonialism in the Malvinas, and the futile and regrettable blockades of Cuba under the Caribbean sun.

Our biological duty is, above all, to respect life, promote it, take care of it, reproduce it and understand that WE are the species.