The Portuguese are the unknown people. We are lost in this vast country. Nobody knows we are here. To be Portuguese in America is to be a stone dropped in the middle of the ocean. It sinks beneath the waves and vanishes without a trace.

Our English Parliament says that Spaniards fish in our waters by quota. The Europeans say that's illegal by their law. It's no longer English waters, if you please ... It's European waters. All can come into your European waters. They've got to reverse an Act of Parliament to do that and I say they have no right whatsoever to do it. They were never given the right by treaty to overrule our sovereignty. That's only done by the courts themselves who are manned by pan-Europeans. Their decisions are all influenced by their ideology. ... It's quite plain that these pan-Europeans do not go by the words of the treaty. That's why I don't think there's much chance of altering things. I'd rather go with John of Gaunt — England, "This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,/Dear for her reputation through the world,/Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,/Like to a tenement or pelting farm". That's what I feel like now. I'm getting old. That's what we are, a tenement of Europe. I die pronouncing it.

We never planned to live like that, later, as it happened, we became refugees and ended up internally displaced in what would have otherwise seemed like barren landscapes.

We were born in a flourishing realm, but we did not believe that its boundaries were those of our knowledge.

In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the wherefore.

Ah, Harry, we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.

In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Living artificially in towns, we are sickly, and never come to know ourselves.

I don't know how to explain it. It was a feeling of not knowing where I belong.

The Portuguese provinces are governed by men whom I hold to be animated with as sincere a hatred against the slave trade as any English or American philanthropist has shown. It would really be one of the riskiest undertakings for any slave trader to attempt to revive the slave trade on Portuguese territory today, either by sea or by land. It cannot be denied that there is some traffic on the frontiers of the colonies of Portugal by Portuguese subjects, when they succeed in escaping the surveillance of the authorities; however, it is essential to make a clear distinction between the African Portuguese and the European Portuguese.

We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us, Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard.

Anything we have not had to decipher, to bring to light by our own effort, anything which was already clearly visible, is not our own.

We have played the football as we wanted but I still think we are not aware of what we have achieved.