The manager believes soccer is a science and the field a laboratory, but the genius of Einstein and the subtlety of Freud is not enough for the owners and the fans. They want a miracle worker like Our Lady of Lourdes, with the stamina of Gandhi.
— Eduardo Galeano
From their castle in Zurich, the owners of soccer do not propose, they impose. That's their way.
The more the technocrats programme it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs: the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bow-legged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.
From 8 A.M. until noon, I am pessimistic. Then from 1 P.M. until 4, I feel optimistic.
The purpose of torture is not getting information. It's spreading fear.
I wanted to be a soccer player, and I became the best of the best, the number one, better than Maradona, better than Pele, and even better than Messi - but only at night, nighttime, during my dreams. When I wake up, I realized that I have wooden legs and that I'm doomed to be a writer.
Even though professional soccer has become more about business and less about the game itself, I still believe football is a party for the legs that play it and for the eyes that watch it.
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?
What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. It's not there.
Indignation must always be the answer to indignity. Reality is not destiny.
So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.
It's a difficult competition against silence, because silence is a perfect language, the only language which says with no words.
The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.
The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.
Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-thinking language able to tie the heart and the mind, which have been divorced.
Each time a new war is disclosed in the name of the fight of the good against evil, those who are killed are all poor. It's always the same story repeating once and again and again.
Always in all my books I'm trying to reveal or help to reveal the hidden greatness of the small, of the little, of the unknown - and the pettiness of the big.
The technocracy of professional sport has managed to impose a soccer of lightning speed and brute strength: a soccer that negates joy, kills fantasy and outlaws daring.
I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead, 'A pretty move, for the love of God.' And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle, and I don't give a damn which team or country performs it.
We have a memory cut in pieces. And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow.
I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.
There are some writers who feel they are elected by God. I am not. I am elected by the devil - this is clear.
Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.
I'm attracted to soccer's capacity for beauty. When well played, the game is a dance with a ball.
If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.
Every two weeks, a language dies. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.
The diversity of life is so stimulating for me.
Here in the United States, corporations has human rights. And then why not - why not nature also, if corporations can defend themselves, saying, 'We have human rights?' Well, let's admit that nature also should be protected.
Each day has a story to - deserves to be told, because we are made of stories. I mean, scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories.
I am grateful to journalism for waking me up to the realities of the world.
When a book is alive, really alive, you feel it. You put it to your ear here, and you feel it breathe, sometimes laugh, sometimes cry, just like a person, a little person.
Almost all wars, perhaps all, are trade wars connected with some material interest. They are always disguised as sacred wars, made in the name of God, or civilization or progress. But all of them, or almost all of the wars, have been trade wars.
I am quite prehistoric, absolutely prehistoric.
The walls are the publishers of the poor.
The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots.
I think the purpose of the writer is to help us see. The writer is someone who can perhaps have the joy of helping others see.
In 1492, the natives discovered they were Indians; they discovered they lived in America.
The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret. Every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.
I remember that - you know, I didn't receive a formal education. I was educated in the Montevideo cafe, in the cafes of Montevideo. There, I received my first lessons in the art of telling stories, storytelling.
A lot of leftists think it is soccer's fault that people don't think, while most rightists are convinced that soccer is a proof that people think with their feet.
In the Age of the Almighty Computer, drones are the perfect warriors. They kill without remorse, obey without kidding around, and they never reveal the names of their masters.
Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim.
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.
Less is always more. The best language is silence. We live in a time of a terrible inflation of words, and it is worse than the inflation of money.
Most of wars or military coups or invasions are done in the name of democracy against democracy.
History never really says goodbye. History says, 'See you later.'
There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.
My language is a feel-thinking language, feeling and thinking at once, that is why it is a celebration of life, and at once it is a denunciation of everything that is not allowed in life to be real life, it's plenitude.
We Latins are known for jabbering on.
Richness in the world is a result of other people's poverty. We should begin to shorten the abyss between haves and have-nots.
