Ingrid Betancourt Quotes
I was discovering that the most precious gift someone can give us is time, because what gives time its value is death.
In this condition of the most devastating humiliation, I still possessed the most precious of liberties, that no-one could take away from me: that of deciding who I wanted to be.
It is said that the compensation for the effort courage, tenacity, and endurance displayed during the journey was not happiness. Nor glory. What God offered as a reward was only rest.
What we have in Colombia is a war against the poor and the guerillas from the left side are against the poor.
In Colombia today we have 16% of the population, which is a very small amount of the population owning 90% of the land and 20 years ago it wasn't like that.
I knew of no instruction manual for reaching a higher level of humanity and a greater wisdom. But I felt intuitively that laughter was the beginning of wisdom, as is was indispensable for survival.
I no longer knew whether it was raindrops or my own tears that were flowing down my cheeks, and I hated to have to drag along this relic of a sniveling child.
Sometimes I'm fragile, sometimes too emotional, but I'm putting everything I can on my side to be a happy person.
Hostages want to survive - they are very focused on their own little view of things.
After six years without seeing one, I love just seeing a smile - every smile I see gives me hope.
Whatever you could do with your hands was important because it kept you in a motion of being able to produce something, and producing something kept you balanced in a way.
Our life capital is measured in seconds. Once those seconds are gone, we never get them back!
It's important for me to fight for principles. But I am not willing to cope with the nastiness of politics anymore and the endless destructive confrontations that it leads to.
Nothing that I can encounter today can be as bad as what is behind me. There are small things that used to upset me, but now I just think: Who cares?
Sometimes you hear in the United States that in Columbia there is a war between rich and poor, between people that are defending the poor and the rich.
I think there is this sensation of being deprived of something that you are entitled to have.
I think there is limits to the assumption that wherever you are, the situation in a way tells you how to behave.
Before I was abducted, I think that happiness was related to success. Nowadays happiness is related, for me, to rest, peace, serenity.
We can't continue with a justice of vengeance. Peace will require us to accept a certain degree of impunity it's inevitable.
The only thing I've settled in my mind is that I want to forgive, and forgiveness comes with forgetting.
We're humans. Why always turn human attitude into political behaviours? I hate that.
I already knew that I had the ability to free myself from hatred, and I viewed this as my most significant conquest.
I was beginning to think that in life there might be some suffering that was worth enduring.
If you believe what you say, words become reality.
