politicians-from-brazil

"As we live at a hectic pace and often our prayer time takes a back seat, I took the initiative to call on the Brazilian people to unite in prayer."

"Information is power. In pyramids, power is concentrated, so also information, which is hidden or kept to be used at the right time, with a view to accumulating and concentrating more power. In networks, power is deconcentrated, and so is information, which is distributed and disseminated so that everyone has access to the power that their possession represents."

"We respect science (the cancellation of New Year's Eve celebrations after Brazil confirmed the first known cases of the Omicron). The (Rio de Janeiro) city's committee says it can go ahead (new year's eve celebrations) and the state's says no. So it can't take place. Let's cancel the official New Year's Eve celebration in Rio."

"UP was one of the few political parties that actively participated in the anti-racist and anti-fascist acts during the pandemic, because we are the party of those who don't have the right to quarantine, of the app deliverers, of the day laborers, of the homeless, of the street vendors, of those who live in the periphery, in the slums, and in the shantytowns, and this is reflected in the social composition of our militancy."

"O Brasil é o único país do mundo em que o Ministro da Saúde vai cair por ter decidido combater o Coronavírus."

"Brazilian People!"

"Fellow citizens: Today, after fifteen months of bitter fighting – marked daily by all of the anguish which darkens the sad situation of a civil war – having arrived at the heart of Brazil and the banks of the portentous Tocantins, we have the happy opportunity to once again remind our homeland that the patriotic crusade initiated on the fifth of July in the glorious city of Sao Paulo and whose ranks were later added to by the brave sons of the South, has not yet died and will not die, or be overwhelmed by the bayonets of tyranny."

"We know well that the country suffers. So too do the people, with the inevitable procession of violence which accompanies war. It is necessary however, no matter the cost, for Brazil to once again sustain control of its own fate – whether or not new martyrs must add their blood to the blood already sacrificed by those who have given their lives for the liberation of their homeland. To retreat at this moment would forsake an ideal, for so many dear companions have made this great sacrifice. Indeed, after such an abjuration would there most certainly be a loss of life and liberty to absolute despotism. Despotism which has not once brought honor to Christianity or the tradition of generosity in our people. No one wishes to see, however, a desire to wage war on intransigent whims or ambitions. On the contrary: we want peace, and only for peace would we fight for more than fifteen months. Furthermore, we want peace without opprobrium, rooted in justice – that is, in short, able to restore to the country a peace of mind which it so desperately needs. We will surely repel the dark and tragic peace which masks the vilification of the slave’s quarters. Ultimately, if the finality of destiny must represent itself like the last swig of bitter gall to consume, we would prefer, without any hesitancy, the great anguish of being crushed."

"Chupa aqui, idiota! Faz um boquete aqui na minha cara! (quote telling his cameramen to zoom in on his face)"

"Esse aí tá mais quebrado que arroz de terceira! (quote when police captured a criminal who was lynched by the local population)"

"Todo dia tem uma merda!"

"Um beijo na sua alma!"

"Vamos analisar o direito da liberdade de expressão. Ninguém vai nos calar a boca! Não devemos a vagabundo nenhum nesse Estado e nesse País! Aqui não há censura! (quote directed to those who did not like his speech)"

"Vamos tirar a máscara e lavar a cara! (quote against hypocrisy and tendency)"

"Eu prefiro uma verdade que me faça chorar a uma mentira que me faça sorrir!"

"Falsos profetas, falsos moralistas! (quote directed to Human Rights supporters)"

"Neste asfalto negro de violência, as drogas transformam seu filho num cadáver ambulante e sua filha numa prostituta mercantilista!"

"Existem histórias da noite que o dia desconhece!"

"As crianças caem no mundo das drogas enquanto suas mães choram lágrimas de sangue!"

"Ou vai no voto ou vai na bala!"

"Existem três coisas que você só faz uma vez na vida: nascer, morrer e votar no PT!"

"Se gostou, gostou! Se não gostou, que se dane, vá a merda!"

"Cadeia nele, já!"

"Bandido é bandido, malandragem! E bandido você tem que mandar matar!"

"Não precisamos construir mais cadeias! Temos de construir mais cemitérios!"

"Quem defende bandido está contra a família brasileira!"

"Ele tá sentado no colo do Capeta agora! (quote about any criminal killed by the Police)"

"Quem fala demais dá "bom-dia" a cavalo!"

"Eu não fui desmamado com garapa! A teta da minha mãe tinha leite, e era leite do bom! (quote when someone tried to pretend/fool him)"

"Você mata, com um botijão de gás, uma média de 500 bandidos por dia!"

"Tá com pena dele? Leva para tua casa! Põe para dormir na tua cama! (quote directed to Human Rights activists who supposedly defend criminals)"

"Ei! Eei! Eeei! Eeeei! Desgraça de televisão do Satanás! (quote he angrily shouts when he is told of a technical failure in the studio)"

"Bandido bom é bandido morto!"

"...“We need to let go of this sardonic dog sentiment and believe that we have remarkable Brazilians, as Dumont was.”"

"I believe in future generations; I believe in education, in the elimination of all that is worthless in our culture. We must leave only the good things. I don't need to explain this in detail. Every Brazilian knows which way of thinking and which negative attitudes comprise the root of the behavior that prevents our progress, with order, in a more accelerated rhythm."

"What someone says or writes about me doesn't change the way I am; it only changes my opinion about that person."

"People are the most important things in this life. Treat them as something precious because that is exactly what they are. Just like our beautiful Planet, we are all insignificant compared to the vastness of the Universe. We are all essentially equal. We are not alone and isolated: when you hurt someone, you hurt yourself; when you help someone, you help yourself."

"Our true motivation isn't sustained only by titles and material results of a campaign. Our actual reward is not to have "that" car, or to reach "that" specific post. In reality, we seek emotional satisfaction: to feel pleasure and happiness!"

"In history obedience rarely pays; what pays is defiance."

"Openness to the new is the virtue that describes the moral consequence of the doctrine of the relation of spirit to structure. The religion of the future inherits this doctrine from the struggle with the world, and radicalizes it. This virtue acts out the human truth of our relation to the settled contexts of our life and thought. That they are ephemeral and defective, that they cannot accommodate all the experience and insight we have reason to value, that there is always more in us, individually as well as collectively, than is, or ever can be, in them are facts giving us persistent reason to rebel against such structures."

"The driving force in the world economy is fast becoming a global confederation of productive vanguards. The vanguards established in different parts of the world drive one another forward. They trade with one another. They transfer personnel, technology, and organizational practices among themselves. Above all, they emulate one another."

"In our advance to a greater life, we confront an initial obstacle. Unless we remove or overcome this obstacle, we can rise no further. We spend our time in a daze of diminished existence, neither awake nor asleep. We resign ourselves to compromise and routine, seeing the world through the categories of the prevailing culture or the methods of established ways of thinking. We reconcile ourselves to the mutilation of our experience that we begin to accept when we entered on a particular course of life. We allow ourselves to be subdued by the carapace of diminished experience that formed around is, as we grew older. For the vast majority of men and women, overwhelming economic necessity and drudgery overwhelm and disguise a stupefaction that would otherwise be apparent. For the increasing number of people who, with the material progress of society, are released from grinding material constraint, there is no disguise. In this way, we cease to live as embodied spirit: as the context-bound but context-resisting agents that we really are. That which is most precious—life itself—we give away in return for nothing. We belittle ourselves, wrongly mistaking our belittlement for a fate as inescapable as our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability."

"It has been a continuing theme of this book that our commitment to any approach to the problems of existence (the overcoming of the world, the humanization of the world, and the struggle with the world first among them) can enjoy no definitive justification. Its demands always exceed, immeasurably, its grounds for making them. It says, “Follow me.” It can never give a conclusive reason to do so. All that it can do is to make an incomplete argument and a defeasible appeal. It cannot escape the circularity in all our large-scale transformative projects: for better or worse, each of them is a partly self-fulfilling prophecy. If it is embraced and it works, it remakes part of experience in its image."

"If I propose something distant, you may sayː interesting, but utopian. If I propose something close, you may answerː feasible but trivial. In contemporary efforts to think and talk programmatically, all proposals are made to seem either utopian or trivial. We have lost confidence in our ability to imagine structural change in society, and fall back upon a surrogate standardː a proposal is realistic if it approaches what already exists. It is easy to be a realist if you accept everything."

"In Brazil as in the United States, we find two voices of a New World promise of happinessː a promise to raise up human life to the exuberance of nature itself while breaking down the hierarchies and privileges that keep people distant from one another. A society of originals whose enhanced powers and self-possession enable them to accept one another more fully is the aim of this American and Brazilian dream. Translated into another, more universal vocabulary, this longing represents one form of the effort to reconcile a pagan ambition of greatness with a Christian idea of tenderness, purging the former of its impulse toward masterfulness and the latter of its knack for resentment. Thus, empowerment and solidarity can come more fully together."

"In a free society, the individual has the educational equipment, as well as the economic and political occasion, to cross the frontier between the activities that take the framework for granted and those that bring it into question. He has been educated in a way that enables the mind as imagination to become ascendant over the mind as machine. He has learned to philosophize by acting, in the sense that he recognizes in every project the seed of some great or small reformation."

"By the structure of society, I mean the institutional and ideological presuppositions that shape the routine practices, conflicts, and transactions in that society, and that are largely taken for granted, even to the point of being invisible, as if they were part of the nature of things. In a free society, this institutional and ideological framework does not present itself as an alien fate beyond the reach of the transformative will and imagination."

"Imagination over dogma, vulnerability over serenity, aspiration over obligation, comedy over tragedy, hope over experience, prophecy over memory, surprise over repetition, the personal over the impersonal, time over eternity, life over everything."

"To explore the countercurrents of consciousness in a given circumstance—uncertain promises of other futures; to trace the struggle between spirit and structure in every domain of social and cultural life; to show how vision becomes embodied in institutions and practices and, in being embodied, is both undermined and corrected, but in any event transformed; to reveal how we forfeit our freedom to imagine and reconstruct, and then regain it, even against our will; to commandeer alien wisdom the better to criticize the established order and present experience; to give voice to what has lost a voice or not yet gained one; to display in every department of our experience, from the micro to the macro and from passion to calculation, the revolt of the infinite within us against the finite around us—all this is the work of the humanities when they recognize us for what we are and might become."

"For the struggle with the world, ordinary men and women have the spark of the divine. They are embodied spirit, unresigned to belittling circumstance. They can ascend, whether or not with the help of divine grace …. It is not just that the lowly are equal to the lordly and that the vulgar forms of sensibility are as revealing as the hieratic or canonical ones. It is that the lowly and the vulgar are higher. They are higher because they are freer from the posturing and vigilance—over himself and others—that prevent each of us from coming closer to what Shakespeare called the thing itself: unaccommodated man. The more orphaned ordinary men and women are by the established powers of the world, the more reason they have to find the divine within themselves and to struggle against the constraints that established arrangements impose on their rise to a larger life and a higher state of being."