I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past.
Todas las guerras son guerras entre ladrones demasiado cobardes para luchar, que mandan a otros a morir por ellos.
The theories of Milton Friedman gave him the Nobel Prize; they gave Chile General Pinochet.
Esa realidad y esos libros muestran que el subdesarrollo latinoamericano es una consecuencia del desarrollo ajeno, que los latinoamericanos somos pobres porque es rico el suelo que pisamos y que los lugares privilegiados por la naturaleza han sido malditos por la historia.
On popular education: To make students recite by rote what they do not understand is like training parrots. Teach children to be curious so they learn to obey their own minds rather than obeying authorities the way the narrow-minded do, or obeying custom the way the stupid do. He who knows nothing, anyone can fool. He who has nothing, anyone can buy.
Evicted by cars, cornered by violence, condemned to isolation, we live packed in ever closer to one another and feel ever more alone, with ever fewer meeting places and ever less time to meet.
I confess I get a pain from reading valuable works by certain sociologists, political experts, economists, and historians who write in code. Hermetic language isn’t the invariable and inevitable price of profundity. In some cases it can simply conceal incapacity for communication raised to the category of intellectual virtue. I suspect that boredom can thus often serve to sanctify the established order, confirming that knowledge is a privilege of the elite.
Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good soccer. 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.
She’s on the horizon... I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking.
Work is the most useless of vices. There is no commodity in the world cheaper than labor. While wages fall and hours rise, the labor market vomits up people. Take it or leave it – there’s a long line behind you.
17 January The Man who Executed God In 1918, in the midst of the revolutionary upheaval in Moscow, Anatoly Lunacharsky presided over the court that judged God. A Bible sat in the chair of the accused. According to the prosecutor, throughout history God had committed many crimes against humanity. The defence lawyer assigned to the case argued that God was not fit to stand trial due to mental illness; but the tribunal sentenced Him to death.
La nostalgia es un perro perseguidor que le muerde los talones.
Lady Gough’s Book of Etiquette, published in 1863, established some of the social commandments of the times: one must avoid, for example, the intolerable proximity of male and female authors on library shelves. Books could only stand together if the authors were married, such as in the case of Robert and Elizabeth Browning.
La impunidad exige la desmemoria.
Throughout the history of humanity, only one refuge kept books safe from war and conflagration: the walking library, an idea that occurred to the grand vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, at the end of the tenth century. This.
Advertising enjoins everyone to consume, while the economy prohibits the vast majority of humanity from doing so. The command that everybody do what so many cannot becomes an invitation to crime. In the papers, crime stories have more to say about the contradictions of our times than all the articles about politics and economics.
The expansion of the kingdom of Castile extended God’s reign over the earth.
Hemos guardado un silencio bastante parecido a la estupidez.
In professional football, like everything else, the crime does not matter as long as the alibi is good.
Nearly two thousand years before all this, the biblical patriarch who wrote the book of Acts told the story of two early Christians, Ananias and his wife Sapphira, who sold a piece of land and lied about the price. When God found out, he killed them on the spot. If God had time for football, how many directors would remain alive?
Wars Always Lie; No war has the honesty to confess; I kill so that I can steal. Wars always invoke noble motives: they kill in the name of peace, in the name of civilization, the name of progress, of democracy. And, if so many lies weren’t enough, the media is always ready to invent imaginary enemies to justify converting the world into a grand lunatic asylum and an immense slaughterhouse.