Heads Of State

"Meet the president - who lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his pay. Laundry is strung outside the house. The water comes from a well in a yard, overgrown with weeds. Only two police officers and Manuela, a three-legged dog, keep watch outside. This is the residence of the president of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, whose lifestyle clearly differs sharply from that of most other world leaders. President Mujica has shunned the luxurious house that the Uruguayan state provides for its leaders and opted to stay at his wife's farmhouse, off a dirt road outside the capital, Montevideo. The president and his wife work the land themselves, growing flowers. This austere lifestyle - and the fact that Mujica donates about 90% of his monthly salary, equivalent to $12,000 (£7,500), to charity - has led him to be labelled the poorest president in the world... Elected in 2009, Mujica spent the 1960s and 1970s as part of the Uruguayan guerrilla Tupamaros, a leftist armed group inspired by the Cuban revolution. He was shot six times and spent 14 years in jail. Most of his detention was spent in harsh conditions and isolation, until he was freed in 1985 when Uruguay returned to democracy. Those years in jail, Mujica says, helped shape his outlook on life....Uruguayan law means he is not allowed to seek re-election in 2014. Also, at 77, he is likely to retire from politics altogether before long."

"Anyone who looks at a map to say that Venezuela could be a threat has to be quite mad. Venezuelans have a marvelous Constitution – the most audacious in all of Latin America."

"Consider that human life is a miracle, that we are alive as a result of a miracle, and that nothing is more important than life."

"Let us consider the deep-rooted causes, the civilization of waste, the present civilization that is stealing time from human life and wasting it on pointless matters."

"Our biological duty is, above all, to respect life, promote it, take care of it, reproduce it and understand that WE are the species."

"If our dreams are to come true, we will have to control ourselves or we will die. We will die because we are not capable of being at the level of the civilization that we have been developing with our efforts. That is our dilemma. We should not spend our time merely correcting the consequences."

"What is the big picture of which we speak? It is the system of global life on Earth, including human life, with all the fragile balances that make it impossible for us to continue as we are."

"With talent and collective work, with science, step by step humankind can make deserts green; humankind can bring agriculture to the seas; humankind can develop agriculture that lives with salt water."

"If the power of humankind is focused on what is essential, it is infinite."

"The greed that pushed us to domesticate science and transform technology — is paradoxically pushing us over the edge into a shadowy abyss, towards an unknown fate, an era without history, and we are left without eyes to see or the collective intelligence to continue to colonize and transform ourselves."

"The globalized economy has no other driving force except that of the private interests of the very few, and each nation State seeks only to maintain its own stability."

"So I salute the efforts and agreements being made. And I will adhere to them, as a ruler. I know some things I’m saying are not easy to digest. But we must realize that the water crisis and the aggression to the environment is not the cause. The cause is the model of civilization that we have created. And the thing we have to re-examine is our way of life."

"Turning to a useful neo-Keynesianism on a global scale in order to abolish the world’s most flagrant embarrassments would be a thousand times more profitable than making war."

"I am greatly anguished by the future that I will not see, and to which I have committed myself. Yes, it is possible to have a world with better humankind, but perhaps today the main task is to save life..."

"Today, it is time to fight to prepare a world without borders."

"How many millions of dollars have they taken from our pockets deliberately creating junk so that people will buy and buy and buy?...In our culture, we act as if nothing had happened. Instead of us controlling globalization, it controls us."

"It is possible to eliminate poverty from the planet. It is possible to create stability. It will be possible for future generations, if they begin to reason as a species and not just as individuals..."

"Our civilization has mounted a deceitful challenge, and as we go on it is not possible for everyone to achieve that goal. Indeed, our culture is increasingly driven by accumulation and market forces. We are promised a life of spending and squandering; in fact, it is a countdown against nature and against future humankind. It is a civilization against simplicity, against sobriety, against all natural cycles; It is a civilization against freedom, which requires time to experience human relationships and the most important things: love, friendship, adventure, solidarity and family"

"What are we thinking?...What would happen to this planet if Indians would have the same proportion of cars per household [as] Germans? How much oxygen would we have left? Does this planet have enough resources so... eight billion can have the same level of consumption & waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet... Are we ruling over globalization or is globalization ruling over us? Is it possible to speak of solidarity and of “being all together” in an economy based on ruthless competition? How far does our fraternity go? I am not saying any of to undermine the importance of this event. On the contrary, the challenge ahead of us is of a colossal magnitude and the great crisis is not an ecological crisis, but rather a political one."

"Stupefied, we have rejected our own biological imperative, which defends life for life’s sake as a superior cause, and we have replaced it by functional consumerism and accumulation."

"Today, man does not govern the forces he has unleashed, but rather, it is these forces that govern man; and life. Because we do not come into this planet simply to develop, just like that, indiscriminately. We come into this planet to be happy. Because life is short and it slips away from us. And no material belonging is worth as much as life, and this is fundamental.But if life is going to slip through my fingers, working and over-working in order to be able to consume more, and the consumer society is the engine-because ultimately, if consumption is paralyzed, the economy stops, and if you stop economy, the ghost of stagnation appears for each one of us, but it is this hyper-consumption that is harming the planet. And this hyper-consumption needs to be generated, making things that have a short useful life, in order to sell a lot. Thus, a light bulb cannot last longer than 1000 hours. But there are light bulbs that last 100,000 hours! But these cannot be manufactured, because the problem is the market, because we have to work and we have to sustain a civilization of “use and discard”, and so, we are trapped in a vicious cycle. These are problems of a political nature, which are showing us that it’s time to start fighting for a different culture."

"It is true that today, in order to spend and to bury our garbage in what science calls the carbon footprint, if in this world we aspired to consume like the average American, we would need three planets in order to be able to live."

"Politics, the eternal mother of all human endeavors, has remained shackled to the economy and to the marketplace."

"The fight against the dirty economy, drug trafficking, theft & fraud, corruption - all of these contemporary scourges which were adopted by this opposite set of values, those who maintain that we are happier when we are richer no matter what means are used."

"We have sacrificed the old immaterial Gods and now we are occupying the temple of the market god. This god organizes our economy, our politics, our habits, our lives and even provides us with rates and credit cards and gives us the appearance of happiness."

"Going from one adventure to another, politics achieves little more than perpetuating itself, and as such it delegates its power and spends its time bewildered, fighting for the Government. Out of control, human history marches forward, buying and selling everything and innovating in order to negotiate what is, in a way, non-negotiable..."

"That NATO advance makes no sense. It is going to lead us again to a division of the world."

"I’m not talking about returning to the days of the caveman, or erecting a “monument to backwardness.” But we cannot continue like this, indefinitely, being ruled by the market, on the contrary, we have to rule over the market."

"It seems that we have been born, only to consume. And when we can no longer consume, we have a feeling of frustration, we suffer from poverty and we are marginalized...."

"We must achieve a broad planetary consensus to unleash solidarity among the most oppressed and to punish and tax waste and speculation by mobilizing the large economies not to produce disposable goods, but rather useful goods without planned obsolescence or excess, which would help the world’s poorest peoples. Useful goods could stand against world poverty."

"This is why I say, in my humble way of thinking, that the problem we are facing is political. The old thinkers. Epicurus, Seneca and even the Aymara put it this way, a poor person is not someone who has little but one who needs infinitely more, and more and more.” This is a cultural issue."

"Locked up, I almost went mad... Now I'm a prisoner of my own freedom to think and decide as I wish. I cultivate that freedom and fight for it. I may make mistakes, some huge, but one of my few virtues is I say what I think... I re-read Plato in search of keys to understand what is going on, for nothing is completely new... Politics, which should rule human relations, has succumbed to economics and become a mere administrator... My definition of poverty is the one we owe to Seneca: It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor... I have the aggressive courage to speak out. It's not done in the modern world, where people conceal and disguise their feelings. Maybe that's why I get people's attention... This [marijuana] law is a trial. It doesn't mean we have the final answer....The only thing I'm sure of is that the policy of combating drugs which has been enforced for decades is a crashing failure.... I think recognition of gay marriage, abortion and the law on marijuana all represent progress. But they will really achieve something when there is less of a gap between the poor, the destitute and the very rich... You know what getting old means? No longer wanting to leave home."

"I bear upon my shoulders the indigenous cultures, the remains of colonialism in the Malvinas, and the futile and regrettable blockades of Cuba under the Caribbean sun."

"I have the duty to fight for tolerance for those who are different and with whom we have differences and disagreements. We do not need tolerance for those with whom we agree. Tolerance is the foundation of peaceful coexistence, understanding that we are all different in this world."

"Bourgeois democracy: I defend it and I criticise it. What do I criticise? That it promises a degree of equality that it does not fulfill in practice.. If democracy has to represent the majority, as a symbol I understand that those who have the highest responsibilities should live as the majority does, not the minority. We have become feudal and the monarchy has come back in a different form.Bold text Presidents—the red carpet, those who play cornets, vassals on the bridge, all this paraphernalia which is not republican, because republics came into the world to reaffirm this: that men are basically equal."

"The average city dweller wanders between financial institutions and tedious office routines, sometimes moderated by air conditioning. He often dreams about vacations and freedom. He dreams about having the ability to pay his bills until one day his heart stops and he is gone. Other such soldiers will fall prey to the jaws of the marketplace."

"We are a republican voice for the world – a proclamation that has been interpreted to signpost a “possible future, a path, however modest, to take for the common good with politics as its ethical base and honesty as its guiding light."

"The philosophy of my heart is libertarian. I don’t like the idea of the exploitation of man by man. I believe that one day human civilization will overcome this somehow. But that is not to say that I favour the state as the owner of everything, no, no, no. I can’t conceive of that. I lean a lot towards self-management, with all of the risks it entails for any important institution. It is not exactly the state that should manage things, it’s the people that have to manage them."

"Truly productive capitalism is a prisoner of the banks, which are at the summit of global power."

"Today, the world is incapable of establishing global regulations for the planet, due to the failure of lofty global politics, which meddles with everything."

"I don’t believe in cuts, I believe in rational restructuring. Massive layoffs also lead to a contraction in consumption and that’s something you don’t need."

"We Croatians are suffering from an overdose of history during the past century. Of course we still have some nationalism. But the feelings are slowly cooling down."

"I do not intend to be a corrective, but rather a constructive factor in areas of direct competence or co-competence of the President of the Republic, and in general. In my view, this arises from the spirit of our Constitution. I will be committed, above all, to those elements of defence and national security that open the possibility for making headway, both in terms of professional achievements and education, as well as in the transparency of these important and extremely sensitive systems."

"We, as a small country and a small economy, contribute little or nothing to climate change and global warming."

"We don't view Greece as a delinquent. The crisis there is a warning symbol for a path that we should not take."

"Violence, poverty and hunger are once again on the rise. Our post-pandemic recovery will be even more hard pressed in upending the world’s uneven economic development. Devastating natural disasters, especially due to severe weather patterns, are increasingly more difficult to deal with. And as our best scientific minds tell us, we can no longer afford to ignore how climate change is making natural hazards worse. Migration continues to rise, further fuelling discontent in its wake. All along, populists and disinformation campaigns, blatantly or maliciously ignoring factual accounts, can unnervingly shake people’s confidence in public authorities, in science and in the media. But we cannot, we must not give in."

"To defend the constitution, I will fight against thieves and all that I have said in the campaign. I haven’t promise miracles. I’ll do what I promised."

"And one more thing about the Croats in World War II. To go to war as a Croat in 1941 and 1942 was an act of incredible bravery and adventure, something that is difficult to describe in words, something that has no graphic form. Croats weren’t persecuted in the way Serbs and Jews were."

"You can expect constructive cooperation, and not destructive behavior. When I gather people, who are worthy and who I consider to be the best, it won’t be to lock horns with the government. It is easy to be resourceful in the position of the presidency every day. My big advantage is that I know what it looks like on the other side. It’s a lot more difficult."

"We are a European state, we are getting better in public affairs and we should do even better and make use of every euro of European money allocated to us, every single euro. That must be our goal. Of course, not every goal can always be met in every war, in every operation, in every human struggle and endeavour. But our goals should be set high."