People From Brazil

"The Brazilian needs to be studied. He doesn’t catch anything. You see a guy jumping into sewage, diving in, right? Nothing happens to him."

"By "Mongrel Complex" I mean the inferiority in which Brazilians put themselves, voluntarily, in comparison to the rest of the world. Brazilians are the reverse Narcissus, who spit in their own image. Here is the truth: we can't find personal or historical pretexts for self-esteem."

"Writing in the 1950s, the playwright Nelson Rodrigues saw his countrymen as afflicted with a sense of inferiority, and he coined a phrase that Brazilians now use to describe it: "the mongrel complex". Brazil has always aspired to be taken seriously as a world power by the heavyweights, and so it pains Brazilians that world leaders could confuse their country with Bolivia, as Ronald Reagan once did, or dismiss a nation so large – it has 180 million people – as "not a serious country", as Charles de Gaulle did."

"Decoupling growth from is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation."

"Restoration of peatlands is a low hanging fruit, and among the most cost-effective options for mitigating climate change."