Top 15 Luis Muñoz Marín Quotes

let us dedicate this new decade to the grand enterprise of a great education for Puerto Rico.

The public philosophy of our people should be much more than their political status; much more than their technology and their economy. It is or should be the deepest expression of their unity and their soul.

once the basic needs and comforts are provided for, this growing economic energy should be used to create more personal freedom in all its multiple aspects. We have already pointed out what these are: more universities, more museums, more laboratories and libraries, more opportunities for adults to continue their education beyond the mere attainments of techniques for earning a living, more individuality in decisions, better neighborly feeling, better neighborhoods, greater appreciation of, rather than imitation of, the neighbor-in short, more serenity.

A good civilization, it seems to me, is one which continues to work energetically to create more wealth, but directs this wealth toward the fulfillment of deeper values. Once certain basic needs are satisfied and certain basic comforts are available to all, it turns its attention to the attainment of more meaningful and lasting satisfactions than the mere possession and consumption of merchandise.

a good civilization, our true final goal.

The man who knows something today that he did not know yesterday is today, in that degree, a freer man than he was yesterday, because ignorance is servitude and knowledge is freedom. Parents who know today that they can provide their children with an adequate education are much freer than they were yesterday, if yesterday they lived in uncertainty as to whether or not they could educate their children. If a family knows it can move from a slum to a public housing development and later, as its economic condition improves, to a home of its own, it has greater freedom of spirit than one that despairs of ever being able to improve its lot... In a rapidly growing economic system such as Puerto Rico has and should continue to have, with increasing opportunities for greater economic well-being, all who now have hope, rather than despair, are freer because of this hope.

Political liberty-under any political status-is in itself only one of the many expressions of human liberty.

The distribution of this great wealth-the way in which it is apportioned to profits, wages, and professional salaries, education, health, continuing economic development, social security, recreation, housing, communications is extremely important...I propose that economic justice be maintained or improved as part of the agenda of the future.

I believe that if Puerto Rico had been a federated state of the Union in, say, 1945, at the end of World War II, it would never have been able to attain the economic development, with its consequent social progress, which has been observed and admired by the whole world all these years

the best political status for a country has the consent of its people and helps, or at least does not greatly hinder, the growth of its economy. It participates in the development of what is good in its culture-the culture that the people desire for themselves on the basis of this economy.

A government is not an end in itself. It is a means for the appropriate organization of a political community. Neither is a political status for the same reason-an end in itself.

When the economic development of Puerto Rico reaches a point where any other political status may be consistent with a prosperous life and a good civilization, the people of Puerto Rico may then take up the question of political status. For they will then be free, truly free, of the coercion of destructive and inexorable economic realities, to decide whether they wish to continue using Commonwealth as a means toward the ideal of the good life, or whether they prefer to use any other status as a means to this end. What I am saying is that a political status should not be a straitjacket, a fetish, an unreasoned prejudice, but a great means toward much deeper and more significant ends.

Commonwealth status provides us with a means adapted to the high end of creating an excellent civilization here in Puerto Rico. There is talk as to whether the Commonwealth status is or is not permanent. Strictly speaking, nothing in the world is permanent; but, accepting this as a relative term, I will say that the Commonwealth status shall be as permanent as the people of Puerto Rico may desire. It is fruit of our people's freedom of thought, and its permanence or impermanence should be the fruit of our people's continuing freedom to make decisions.

The objective is, I repeat, a good civilization based on the abolition of poverty. A political status that puts obstacles in the path of that ideal cannot be, so long as it creates obstacles, the status that gives real freedom to the people of Puerto Rico.

The history of Puerto Rico in the past decades has been that of two drives seeking to merge into one: the drive to abolish poverty and the drive of the people toward the ideal image of themselves.