38 quotes found
"Unless we make revolutionary reforms, some day — in some unknown serra — some unknown Fidel Castro will rise up in Brazil."
"Lincoln was one of history's greatest men, but Americans are not like him. He was a lonely exception."
"How can the reality of 600 million Chinese be ignored?"
"From a distance I became more convinced than ever that Almighty God destined us to become a great people."
"Your place is here, in my heart."
"I won't trade one Brazilian worker for a hundred of these tidy little grandfins."
"The image projected in Veja Magazine about my life in exile, presenting me as a rich landlord, oblivious to the problems of the homeland, does not reflect reality."
"It is regrettable that still large parts of the population that have had access to higher education remain insensitive to the national reality."
""...I will only return to my country through the front door, democratically. My duty, my right is to remain quiet, one day History judges me”"
""...the major objective of Brazilian society is the strengthening of peace. We believe that the ideological conflict between West and East cannot and should not be solved militarily, because if in a nuclear war we saved our lives, we would not be able to save, whether we won or were won, our reason for living"."
""What threatens democracy is hunger, it is misery, it is the disease of those who have no resources to face it. These are the evils that can threaten democracy, but never the people in the public square in the use of their legitimate and democratic rights"."
"the American will overthrow me by phone if he wants to."
"I could not commit the levity of allowing Brazil to be divided."
"...Fate itself reserved the Presidency for me after the events that are still in the memory of all of us. They were strange events to the will of the people, also strange to my will, because I wasn't even in Brazilian territory, which reserved to me the responsibility of directing the destiny of our homeland. But I assumed the position with humility, asking all the living forces of the country, the men of production and the men of work, those in the cities and in the countryside, to help me overcome the serious difficulties I would have to face..."
"...Our motto, Brazilian workers, is progress with justice, and development with equality..."
"Agrarian reform is not the whim of a government or the program of a party. It is the product of the pressing need of all the peoples of the world..."
"It is, therefore, understandable that it deeply displeases the conscience of the Brazilian people any form of intervention in an American State, inspired by the allegation of incompatibility with its political regime, to impose on it the practice of the representative system by external coercive means, which take away its democratic character and validity."
"How long could we hold out? Where would we get the resources and fuel we needed? The handovers in Brazil were already guaranteed to receive the support of the United States. Only the civilians would be the big victims. And these are wonderful people, regardless of their political conviction. I would not have this right. Nor would I want to take on this enormous responsibility, which goes against my personal convictions."
"The government recognizes the mistakes of the past and apologizes to a man who defended the nation and its people whom we could never have forgiven."
"The national memory is treated as garbage."
"It is my duty to state in a solemn declaration to History that I have never been insinuated with any movement or tendency to hurt the law or the institutions. I have always heard categorical statements from the President that he would be an uncompromising defender of legality and democratic institutions. [...] I could never defend a government committed to communism."
"There goes my Buddha with his indecipherable thoughts."
"In what he says he will be representing me. You can trust him, as if I were myself."
"The day of happiness will be the memorable day of the emancipation of the people, and the day of emancipation will be the one when the great are put down and the small raised up; when there are neither masters nor slaves; bosses nor subordinates; powerful nor weak; oppressors nor oppressed; but when the vast Brazil is called the common homeland of Brazilian citizens or United States of Brazil."
"If someday (...) the respectable judges of Brazil, forgetful of the respect they owe the law, and of the indispensable duties they have contracted before morality and the nation, corrupted by venality or the deleterious action of power, abandoning the sacrosanct cause of law (...) failing in due justice to the unfortunate ones who suffer unjust slavery, I, on my own account, (...) and under my sole responsibility, will advise and promote, not insurrection, which is a crime, but "resistance", which is a civic virtue."
"I am not a legal scholar, I am not a doctor, I am not a law graduate, I have no pretensions to celebrity, nor am I in the position to occupy a position in the judiciary; I am, however, disgusted by the notorious incongruity of which, with undauntled arrogance, eminent magistrates who have as their office the study of laws, and as their obligation the just application of them."
"Slavery is a kind of social leprosy: it has often been abolished by legislators and restored by education under various aspects."
"I am an abolitionist, without reservation; I am a citizen; I believe I have done my duty."
"There are scenes of such greatness, or of such misery, that being complete in their kind, they cannot be described; the world and the atom define themselves; thus, crime and virtue keep the same proportion; thus, the slave who kills the master, who fulfills an inevitable prescription of natural right, and the unworthy people, who murder heroes, will never be mixed."
"Wretched people; they ignore that it is more glorious to die free on a rope, or torn to pieces by dogs in the public square, than to feast with the Neros in slavery."
"A law is a social monument, a page of history, a lesson in ethnography, a reason for state."
"In front of them Washington, pensive like Archimedes, with the tip of the sacred sword, soaked in the blood of battles, inscribes the United States on the map of the Nations; and Franklin, the modern Teramenes, snatching a ray from the sun, with lucid stars, engraves in infinity the eternal legend of Liberty."
"At half past one o'clock, as today, 90 years ago, expired the man who, in this country, first proposed the liberation of the slaves, and the proclamation of the Republic. He was tried as a defendant of lese-majestie, he was killed, but Tiradentes dead, like the sun at sunset, shows himself to the universe as great as at its dawn."
"Under the law, the crime of murder perpetrated by the slave on the person of the master is justifiable"
"The slave who kills his master, in any circumstance, always does so in self-defense."
"Luiz Gama is the only intellectual, the only black Brazilian personality of the 19th century to have lived the experience of slavery. This is already a fact that makes him unique in the panorama of Brazil in the 19th century"."
"...Luiz Gama was keen to demonstrate, through his example, the fallacy of the pseudoscientific beliefs in vogue in a slaveholding society convinced of the intellectual incapacity and moral inferiority of Africans and their descendants, the basis of the racist ideology that still persists among us.”"
"One hundred years before Martin Luther King, he said he had a sublime dream: the lands of the Cruzeiro, without kings and without slaves."