politicians-from-spain

"For something to be envied it must have two conditions: it must be valuable and it must belong to someone else. This “belong to someone else” is essential: there is no envy without an ownership. And why is it necessary that the good have an owner? Because what is envied is not the particular good, but the joy that it normally carries with it to its owner. The preoccupation of the envious is the happiness of his neighbor. But not all forms of happiness are envied: it is also necessary that the envious person misses the extra happiness that the other enjoys. Envy requires a relative emptiness of happiness and finally the acknowledgment that it cannot be filled in an acceptable space of time. Envy is the pain one feels in the presence of someone else’s happiness, a superior, desired, inaccessible, and unreachable happiness."

"Demagogues appeal to envy because its universality makes potential victims of all people and because the invincible inequality of our own personal capabilities and of the irremediable limitation of many social goods makes it inevitable that the majority will feel inferior to certain minorities. The promotion of this envious feeling of inferiority is the dominant political tactic, at least in the present age. The demagogic promotion of envy, as with everything else that refers to this unpublishable feeling, is not carried out in public but undercover."

"Why [do politicians] appeal to deleterious envy rather than to creative emulation? For the reason that emulation does not accentuate the division, and division is what interests the polarized political class. Emulation distributes energy along the whole group and does not promote the formation of incompatible factions."

"[E]nvy does not provide any valid information about the surrounding environment. On the contrary, it presents the superior person as an enemy and a scandal, and not as a friend and a model; it narrows and darkens the vital horizon, instead of opening it up and shedding light on it; it identifies the envious’s path of happiness with other people’s, and this produces self-ignorance and depersonalization…"

"Envy is pain at someone else’s happiness; jealousy is the pain we feel when we fear that someone else may interfere with the monopoly we have over the person who makes us happy. The envious wishes to deprive the other of something, while the jealous person feels dispossessed of someone he feels belongs to him."

"Europe is a garden. We have built a garden... The rest of the world… is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle. The jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it... [...] The jungle has a strong growth capacity… walls will never be high enough in order to protect the garden. The gardeners have to go to the jungle, Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means."

"We cannot afford Russia to win this war. Otherwise the US and European interests will be very damaged. It is not a matter of generosity alone, It is not a matter of supporting Ukrainian people because we love Ukrainian people. It is in our own interest, and it is also in the interest of the US as a global player, someone who has to be perceived as a reliable partner, a security provider to the allies."

"Russia is a great country, it is a great nation, it is used to fighting to the end, and it is used to almost losing and then recovering. It did it with Napoleon, it did it with Hitler. It would be absurd to think that Russia has lost the war or that its military is incompetent."

""We are infected with lies about reality"."

""Violence is embedded in the DNA of masculinity"."

""The world of representative democracy is ending"."

"The good relations that must always exist between neighboring countries will be restored (border opening between Melilla and Morocco after COVID-19 lockdown)."

"The situation in Ceuta is truly unsustainable (illegal migrations from Morocco into the territory)."

"Let's give dialogue a chance. That is what Spain is pushing for. If dialogue does not bear fruit, of course, Spain will stand with its European partners and its NATO allies united in deterrence (on Russian military build-up on the Ukrainian border)."

"I hold him to be a fool who throughout his life is dying with fear that he must die; and to be a bad man he who lives so careless of it as if death did not exist [...]. The only wise man is he who lives through each day as if at any hour he may die."

"In dangers, the king who looks on orders with his eyes."

"The king is a public person, the needs of the realm are his crown. Reigning is not an amusement but a task. A bad king is he who enjoys his State, a good one he who serves it."

"It is most unfortunate that the king should err at all: but if he must err, it is less shocking that he should do so on his own account, rather than by the advice of others."

"Happy is he who is born to be a king, if, when he reigns, he shows he deserves to be one."

"You must not trust ministers who are very proud of having clean hands [...]. Thieves there are who rob with their feet, with their mouths, with their ears, with their eyes."

"There are some men who lie even when telling the truth, for they tell it with their lips whilst they lie in their hearts."

"Since I teach how to kill I may well claim to be called Galen; and if my wounds were to ride on mule back they would pass for bad doctors."

"For every judge we sow, we gather six attorneys, two draftsmen, four notaries, five barristers, and five thousand negotiators, and the crop comes every day."

"From the mouth of a stone serpent there gushes a jet of water."

"Is there any devil equal to a flatterer, to an envious man, to a false friend, to an evil companion ? Well, the poor man is free from all these; for he is neither flattered, nor envied; he has no friend, good of bad, and no one keeps him company. The poor it is that live well and die better."

"When the devil preaches the world is coming to an end."

"All sinners have less turpitude than the hypocrite, for the former, though they sin against God, do not sin with God or in God, whilst the hypocrite sins against God and also with God, since he takes Him as an instrument of his sin."

"He who loves not a beautiful woman with all his five senses esteems not nature in its greatest care and its highest achievement."

"The philosopher is not he who knows where the treasure is, but he who sets to work and recovers it."

"In fact the world is all agreed and calls commodity honour; so that men need only proclaim that they are honourable with- out being so to mock at the world."

"In our days they count a man him who swears rather than him whose beard is grown."

"Many more people fall ill through bores than through pestilence; and chatterers and meddlers kill many more than doctors."

"The best sign of a man's goodness is neither to fear nor to owe anything, and the clearest sign of his badness is neither to fear nor to pay."

"Women only want a man to grant; for of course they always ask."

"The best terrorist, the dead one."

"Streets are mine!"

"Those who have not learnt from Gasteiz will be responsible for their own acts. Those who want to fight, will be fought. With all of its consequences. Stop being fool."

"Legalising the Basque flag over my dead body."

"We will not seat at the same table with the communists. I will never talk to them."

"The language is named Spanish, not Castillian! Spanish is the language of everybody. It has become the language of Spain already [...] Catalonia was occupied by Felipe IV, by Felipe V (who defeated the Catalans), it was bombed by general Espartero, who was a revolutionary general, and we occupied it in 1939 and we are prepared to take the rifle again. Therefore, you shall guess what to expect. Here I have my rifle to use it again."

"My mother (from ) understood perfectly that she had to teach French, not Basque, which is a dead language."

"I would not execute [by firing squad] certain people. They should be hooked off their balls."

"The Franco Regime has set the basis for an ordered Spain. Actually, just compare today's Spain with the situation in the 30s."

"A great man" [...] "and the greatest and most representative of the Spanish people of the 20th century" [...] "one of the great leaders we have had in our history."

"It is obious that the glorious day of July, 18, 1936 [Franco's coup d'état] was one of the nicest political and social movements that the world remembers. Historians shall admit that the most and best part of the country was the one who raised against the government, illegal and corrupt, who was preparing the darkest red revolution from the power."

"Legalisation of the Communist Party is a real coup d'état."

"It follows from this that the Church alone has the right to affirm and deny, and that there is no right outside her to affirm what she denies, or to deny what she affirms. The day when society, forgetting her doctrinal decisions, has asked the press and the tribune, news writers and assemblies, what is truth and what is error, on that day error and truth are confounded in all intellects, society enters on the regions of shadows, and falls under the empire of fictions…"

"The Socialistic schools, prescinding from the barbarous multitudes which follow them, and considered in their doctors and masters, are far superior to the Liberal school, just because they go straight to all the great problems and questions, and because they always propose a peremptory and decisive solution. Socialism is strong, only because it is a theology; and it is destructive, only because it is a satanic theology. The Socialistic schools, in as much as they are theological, will prevail over the Liberal school, in as much as it is anti-theological and sceptical; and inasmuch as they are satanic, they will succumb before the Catholic school, which is at once theological and divine. Their instincts must be in accord with our assertions, if we consider that they treasure up their hatred for Catholicism, while they have only contempt for Liberalism."

"Catholicity seized on man... and the mystics, transcending all, taught him to ascend on high with the wings of contemplation the Ladder of Jacob composed of brilliant stones, by which God descends to Earth and man ascends to Heaven, till Earth and Heaven, and God and man, burning together in a conflagration of infinite charity, are transmuted into one."

"We have shown that socialism is an incoherent combination of thesis and antithesis, which contradict and destroy one another. Catholicism, on the contrary forms a great synthesis which includes all things in its unity, and infuses them in its sovereign harmony. It may be affirmed of Catholic dogmas, that, although they are diverse, they are one. Only an absolute negation can be opposed to this wonderful synthesis. The Catholic word is then invincible and eternal. Nothing can diminish its sovereign virtue."