Jose Saramago Quotes (61 Quotes)


    I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.


    If shame still has any meaning in this hell we're expected to live...it is thanks to that person who had the courage to go and kill,... Agreed, but shame won't fill our plates,... You're right in what you say, there have always been those who have filled their bellies because they had no sense of shame.

    If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.

    It was my fault, she sobbed, and it was true, no one could deny it, but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt






    We are so afraid of the idea of having to die… that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn…


    You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.

    Secondo me non siamo diventati ciechi, secondo me lo siamo. Ciechi che vedono. Ciechi che, pur vedendo, non vedono".

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

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

    The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.

    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.

    There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is.

    I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.

    I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.


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

    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?

    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.

    Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

    There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

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

    All the scheming and plotting in the world won't result in something lasting, transcendent. Anything that's authentic, that's real, comes in the form of a gift. Even if by accident.

    I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

    This is how everyone has to begin, men who have never known a woman, women who have never known a man, until the day comes for the one who knows to teach the one who does not.

    I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been.

    Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

    This campaign in the United States is not the first one against Egas Moniz, and I suspect it won't be the last, ... But we should not go back and try to rewrite history.

    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.

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

    Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up.

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

    We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.

    The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975.

    The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.

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

    In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.

    I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement.

    Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.

    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.

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

    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.

    It would not be a question of censoring oneself, but of using common sense.

    Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.


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    More Jose Saramago Quotations (By Book Titles)


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