Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

[T]here is literally no bastion of knowledge, not even in the exact sciences, that ideology, with its powers of distortion, cannot breach and into which lies useful to the cause cannot be implanted.

The only way to progress is by stumbling, falling, and getting up, time and again. Error will always be there because the best decisions are always, to some extent, bound up in error. In the great challenge of separating truth from lies—a goal, perhaps the most human of all goals, that is perfectly possible to achieve—it is essential to bear in mind that in this task there can never be definitive achievements that cannot be challenged later, and no knowledge that cannot be revised. In the great forest of misperceptions and deceptions, mistakes and mirages, through which we roam, the only way that truth can clear a path is by rational and systematic criticism of what is—or passes for—knowledge. Without this privileged expression of freedom, the right to criticize, we are condemned to oppression, brutality, and also obscurantism.

Now we have Peronism that is everything: it's the far right and its the center, it's left centrist and is also extreme leftist, it is democracy and is also terrorism, its demagogy is also insanity...Peronism is everything.

[C]ommon sense is the most valuable of political virtues.

We all believe in the regulations, but you have to know how to interpret them.

Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams.

Ahora tenemos un peronismo que es todo: es la extrema derecha, es el centro, es el centro izquierda, es la extrema izquierda, es la democracia y es el terrorismo, es la demagogia y es la insensatez... Todo es el peronismo...

True progress, which has forced back or overthrown barbarous practices and institutions that were the source of infinite suffering for men and women, and has established more civilized relations and styles of life, has always been achieved through a partial, heterodox, distorted application of social theories. Social theories, in the plural, which means that different and even irreconcilable ideological systems have brought about identical or similar forms of progress. The prerequisite was always that these systems should be flexible and could be amended or reformed when they moved from the abstract to the concrete and came up against the daily experience of human beings. The filter at work that separates what is desirable from what is not desirable in these systems is the criterion of practical reason.

Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us.

Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?

He is always furious, on account of what he finds out or what he doesn't find out.

[I]t is normal for outsiders to have a better understanding of what is happening inside dictatorial regimes, because censorship prevents those suffering under dictatorship from being fully aware of the situation in which they are living.

[L]iberalism is above all an attitude toward life and society based on tolerance and respect, a love for culture, a desire to coexist with others and a firm defense of freedom as a supreme value. A freedom that is, at the same time, the driving force of material progress, of science, arts, and letters, and of a civilization that has produced sovereign individuals, with their independence, their rights, and their responsibilities that are always held in balance with those of other individuals, protected by a legal system that guarantees coexistence within diversity. Economic freedom is a key element of liberal doctrine but certainly not the only one.

Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity.

You can't make facts fit the rules, it is the other way round. The rules have to be adopted to fit the facts.