We live in a world that treats the dead better than the living. We, the living are askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on society's tendency to honor the deceased while neglecting the living, suggesting a flawed value system.
Eduardo Galeano's quote critiques a societal tendency to romanticize the dead while overlooking the struggles and complexities of the living. It highlights how the system often prefers the silence of death, equating it with peace and improvement, while simultaneously burdening the living with harsh realities and unanswered questions. This perspective invites us to reconsider our values and how we treat those who are still seeking answers and resilience in life.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of valuing mental health for the living.
Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.
It is highly improbable that the bureaucrat will put his life on the line. It is absolutely impossible that he'll put his job on the line.
History never really says goodbye. History says, 'See you later.'
The more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business.
Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.
In this world of ours, a world of powerful centers and subjugated outposts, there is no wealth that must not be held in some suspicion.
The misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.
Dreaming is a philogenetically older mode of thought.
The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.
It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.
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