José Mujica mastered many things, but the greatest of them all was the word. Reflective and philosophical, strategic and political, biting and controversial; with an ironic and playful tone or as sweet as endearing, José 'Pepe' Mujica uttered hundreds of phrases during interviews and notable speeches that his stratospheric popularity turned into iconic, reports Efe.
"I have one thing: the magic of words," he said when, after stating that he wanted to be remembered as "an old crazy man," he was asked if, with all he had done in a life that went from guerrilla fighter subjected to thirteen years of imprisonment and torture to president, he had more to say about his legacy.
Like the pollinating bees that fly over his famous farm -estate- in Rincón del Cerro, the words of the man who governed Uruguay between 2010 and 2015 and achieved global fame for his modest lifestyle produced sweet honey, but also, many times, stung like a bee. Here we gather 30 of his most remembered quotes:
"Are we governing globalization or is globalization governing us? (...) The challenge we have ahead is of colossal magnitude and the great crisis is not ecological, it is political. Today, man does not govern the forces he has unleashed, but rather the forces he has unleashed govern man" (06/21/2012, speech at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development Rio+20, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).
"We have sacrificed the old immaterial gods and have taken over the temple with the god of the market. It organizes our economy, politics, habits, life, and even finances us in installments and credit cards for the appearance of happiness. It seems that we were born only to consume and consume" (09/24/2013, speech before the United Nations General Assembly, New York, United States).
"Think that human life is a miracle. That we are alive by miracle and nothing is worth more than life. And that our biological duty is above all to respect life and promote it, take care of it, procreate it, and understand that the species is our 'us'" (09/24/2013, same as above).
"Drug consumption is not good, we must not defend drug consumption, drug addiction is a punishment. On the contrary, we must fight so that people do not have addiction. The only addiction worth having on Earth is that of love, the others are for misfortune" (01/31/2014, about the regulation of marijuana consumption promoted during his term, in an interview with RT, Havana).
"Neither the great nation-states nor the transnationals, and even less the financial system, should govern the world. We need high politics intertwined with scientific wisdom in power, that science that does not seek profit, but the future. Intelligence and not interest in power" (09/20/2014, article for the International Policy Journal).
"When you buy something, you don't buy it with money, you buy it with the time of life you had to spend to earn that money, but with this difference, the only thing that cannot be bought is life, life is spent and it is miserable to spend life to lose freedom" (2015, testimony in the documentary 'Human' by Yann Arthus-Bertrand).
"Politics is, in my humble opinion, a sacred function, because it is an anthropological need of human beings" (04/06/2019, in a political event for the 30th anniversary of the MPP).
"It can be wonderful for the human species if robots work for the comfort of humanity. Who said that man is a working animal? He learned to work out of necessity. The little I know about primitive peoples: they worked as little as they could, two hours. It is irrational to believe that man is a worker" (04/03/2023, interview with DW).
"Do not make the mistake of my time. The more divided we are, the more dominated we will be. Therefore: study, do not waste time, take care of democracy. Democracy is not perfect, it is full of defects because they are our human defects, but so far we have not found anything better. Therefore, it is easy to lose it and difficult to regain it. You have to take care of it" (07/13/2023, speech to young people at the 59th Congress of the National Union of Students of Brazil, Brasilia)
"To convey to the girls and boys of this country, to the young people, that life is beautiful, that it is spent and goes away. The crux of succeeding in life is to start over every time you fall. And if there is anger, turn it into hope" (04/29/2024, press conference where he announced the detection of his esophageal tumor, Montevideo).
"I see it in the behavior of animals. I have seen teros nesting in autumn, nonsense. Birds nest in spring because there are plenty of insects. Big and small observations that are there around us, and what we cannot realize! This is a very serious, inexhaustible problem" (06/11/2024, about climate change, at the presentation of the book 'José Mujica. Other Possible Worlds', Montevideo).
"We are relearning, because we keep learning until the grave. We have no line. We cannot have it because our brains are ignorant... Many years with nothing. And we do not come to cry over our pains (...), simply to make it very clear that the handful of old people left has very clearly understood that it is just a stick that must work so that the hive gathers around: the essential thing is not the stick, but the hive" (03/17/1985, at the first event of the guerrilla movement MLN-T after his release)
"Allow me a small emphasis: education, education, education, and education again. Rulers should be obliged every morning to fill pages as in school writing 100 times 'I must take care of education because there the face of the society to come is anticipated'" (03/01/2010, in his inauguration speech as president at the Legislative Palace, Montevideo).
"No one can be in favor of abortion as a matter of principle, but there is a group of women who find themselves in the bitterness of having to make that decision (...) and that world lives in secrecy (...) there are lives lost there. Putting it on the table by legalizing it gives us the possibility to act" (05/31/2013, about the legalization of abortion, in an interview with TVE, Madrid).
"It seems that we are discovering a modern phenomenon, but the reality is that this is older than the mate hole. We have decided to accept the existence of reality" (08/19/2015, about same-sex marriage, approved in 2013 in Uruguay under his term, San José, Costa Rica)
"Politics imposes the need to build collective beings. Because our human strength as individuals is like a leaf in the wind. The struggles, the improvements, the steps of progress in a society depend on man. We can be content to philosophize in a café, but building paths for a society requires paying the cost of building collective wills of many people" (06/20/2016, speech at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom).
"Yesterday afternoon I started reading the UN report on climate change and then I couldn't sleep all night. There are interests that have taken care to despise and ignore what was already said in (the Kyoto protocol) more than 20 years ago (...) Science tells politics what to do, but politics does not listen (...), we cannot claim ignorance. Today it is not science that fails, it is politics" (2022, book Seeds in the Wind: José Mujica).
"Don't be a fool!" (10/10/2003, when he was a senator, to Uruguayan journalist Néber Araújo, during a TV interview on channel Teledoce: the most resonant example of a catchphrase he used in other encounters with journalists).
"This old lady (Cristina Fernández) is worse than the one-eyed man (Néstor Kirchner). The one-eyed man was more of a politician. She is stubborn" (04/04/2013, on an inadvertently open microphone, about the then President of Argentina and her husband, later apologized "sincerely," Sarandí Grande, Uruguay).
"We Uruguayans are a bit lazy, we don't like to work that much" (30/05/2013, to a group of Spanish businessmen, Madrid).
"In FIFA, they are a bunch of old sons of bitches" (30/06/2014, to the press, about the sanction on footballer Luis Suárez in the Brazil World Cup, Montevideo).
"Being a president is not easy, and international negotiations are even harder. To sell a few kilos of oranges to the United States, I had to deal with five crazy Guantanamo guys" (10/05/2016, in a talk, about the agreement with the North American country to host six former prisoners, Córdoba, Argentina).
"I have great respect for (Nicolás) Maduro, but that doesn't stop me from saying that he is crazy, crazy as a goat" (18/05/2016, to the press, about the Venezuelan president).
"It's the most beautiful thing to enter a bank with a .45 (caliber) pistol, that way, everyone respects you" (2018, testimony for the documentary 'El Pepe, a Supreme Life,' by Emir Kusturica).
"Sometimes there are things that have no other answer than torture to find the truth" (22/11/2018, to the press, about the 'silence pact' of the repressors of the Uruguayan dictatorship regarding the disappeared detainees, Montevideo).
"This will end when we all die" (no exact date, about the search for truth about the disappeared detainees during the Uruguayan dictatorship, corrected in May 2024: 'I was wrong').
"You shouldn't stand in front of tanks" (01/05/2019, to the press, asked about the war tanks that ran over protesters during a protest called by Juan Guaidó against the regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, after his statements were rejected he clarified: "What I said is that you should never stand in front of tanks because the one driving them could be crazy (...) but I'm not justifying anything, just trying to educate people").
"Feminism is quite useless, because I believe that machismo is a fact and the rights agenda for equality is unquestionable, but the stridency also ends up messing up the women's cause, because it creates a complaining antipode" (20/12/2019, in an interview with Semanario Voces).
"A woman is always a mother. And we always go around the world needing one, because otherwise, you don't know where your shirt is" (20/12/2019, same as the previous).
"I respect Carolina a lot. She has a gift in her favor: she is a woman, and they are in fashion" (7/11/2022, in an interview with El Observador, about the then Mayor of Montevideo, Carolina Cosse, and her potential to be a presidential candidate for her political force, repudiated by women from her party).