I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.
Soccer is a feast for the eyes that watch it and a joy for the body that plays it.
The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.
I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.
The ball laughs, radiant, in the air. He brings her down, puts her to sleep, showers her with compliments, dances with her, and seeing such things never before seen his admirers pity their unborn grandchildren who will never see them.
Most of wars or military coups or invasions are done in the name of democracy against democracy.
There are those who believe destiny rests at the feet of the gods, but the truth is that it confronts the conscious of man with a burning challenge.
In this world of ours, a world of powerful centers and subjugated outposts, there is no wealth that must not be held in some suspicion.
If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.
Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.
And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.
The purpose of torture is not getting information. It’s spreading fear.
There are visible and invisible dictators. The power structure of world football is monarchical. It’s the most secret kingdom in the world.
For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.
The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.
I have never killed anybody, it is true, but it is because I lacked the courage or the time, not because I lacked the desire.
The world is becoming an immense military base, and that base is becoming a mental hospital the size of the world. Inside the nuthouse, which ones are crazy?
I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity.
If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are.
The fiesta of soccer, a feast for the legs that play and the eyes that watch, is much more than a big business run by overlords from Switzerland. The most popular sport in the world wants to serve the people who embrace it.
A unipolar world – one with only one power – makes sure that this space almost disappears. In a multipolar world this space multiplies. Therefore, there is nostalgia for a multipolar world.