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.
It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel's attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.
Are you scared?’ asked Mr. Ibis. ‘Not really.’ ‘Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand.
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.
If conversion makes no improvements in a man's outward actions then I think his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.
But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.
Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.
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