José Mujica Quotes

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.

We are a republican voice for the world – a proclamation that has been interpreted to signpost a “possible future, a path, however modest, to take for the common good with politics as its ethical base and honesty as its guiding light.

The fight against the dirty economy, drug trafficking, theft & fraud, corruption - all of these contemporary scourges which were adopted by this opposite set of values, those who maintain that we are happier when we are richer no matter what means are used.

We have to figure out how to recycle more and how to counter global warming. What are the limits of each human task? How many years ago did they tell us in Kyoto about certain facts linked to climate change?

Turning to a useful neo-Keynesianism on a global scale in order to abolish the world’s most flagrant embarrassments would be a thousand times more profitable than making war.

The fact is that we tend to cultivate feudal anachronisms, spoiled affectations and hierarchical distinctions that undermine the best feature of republics — the fact that no one is better than anyone else. The interaction of those factors and others keeps us living in prehistory, and today it is impossible to renounce war when politics fails. Thus, economies are strangled and resources wasted.

Every minute in the life of our planet, we spend $2 million on military budgets around the world — $2 million a minute.

This is why I say, in my humble way of thinking, that the problem we are facing is political. The old thinkers. Epicurus, Seneca and even the Aymara put it this way, a poor person is not someone who has little but one who needs infinitely more, and more and more.” This is a cultural issue.

Today, it is time to fight to prepare a world without borders.

We have finally learned that intelligence must be at the helm, guiding the ship to port.

I also bear the consequences of the electronic surveillance, which does nothing but create the distrust that poisons us needlessly.

The globalized economy has no other driving force except that of the private interests of the very few, and each nation State seeks only to maintain its own stability.

Medical research on all manner of diseases, which has made huge advances and is a blessing that promises longer life, receives barely a fifth of what is budgeted for the military. That process, from which we cannot escape, perpetuates hatred, fanaticism and distrust, fuels new wars and wastes fortunes.

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.

Politics, the eternal mother of all human endeavors, has remained shackled to the economy and to the marketplace.