Jose Saramago Quotes

The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.

I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.

People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.

Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes.

A journey never ends. Only the travellers end.

What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?

We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.

No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all.

Each day is a little bit of history

I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends.

...you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing.

We can escape from everything, but not from ourselves.

It is strange how the elderly fall silent when they ought to go on speaking, obliging the young to learn everything from scratch.

In matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.

Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters.

But truths need to be repeated many times so that they don't, poor things, lapse into oblivion.

It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered

It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people.

A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed.

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.

God, the devil, good, evil, it's all in our heads, not in Heaven or Hell, which we also invented. We do not realize that, having invented God, we immediately became His slaves.

Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?

The sun appears in one of the upper corners of the rectangle, on the left of anyone looking at the picture.

Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions. Decisions make us.

One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.

Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

Men are angels born without wings, nothing could be nicer than to be born without wings and to make them grow.

As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.

just like everything else in life, let time take its course and it will find a solution.

Doesn't anybody understand that killing in the name of God only makes Him a murderer?

This must be what it means to be a ghost, being certain that life exists, because your four senses say so, and yet unable to see it.

If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.

Everything in this world can volunteer some reply, what takes up time is posing the questions.

A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little.

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.

I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.

Things will be very bad for Latin America. You only have to consider the ambitions and the doctrines of the empire, which regards this region as its backyard.

Your questions are false if you already know the answer.

Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.

For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.

I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.

I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?

Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.