Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva Quotes

Brazil has a lot of issues that are similar to a lot of countries in Latin America, but the dominant issue Brazil is dealing with is poverty and political corruption.

More than 40 years of African Independence have offered to the world a sad spectacle of a continent looted and humiliated with the complicity of its own sons and daughters.

There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money – and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.

The Arab world had a big problem of frankly venal elites. That is why these revolutions happen, because people didn't think the opportunities were being shared fairly.

As long as you think that the cause of your problem is "out there" - as long as you think that anyone or anything is responsible for your suffering - the situation is hopeless. It means that you are forever in the role of victim, that you’re suffering in paradise.

I've lived long enough to see the triumph of zealots and absolutists, to watch money swallow politics, to witness the rise of the corporate state. See the party of working and poor people become a sycophant of crony capitalism. Watch the union of church and state become fashionable again. Witness the coupling of news and entertainment. See everyday people cast overboard as the pirates and predators of Wall Street seized the ship of state. I didn't drift; I moved left just by standing still.

Oppression makes a poor country.

This great republic is a mockery of freedom as long as you are doomed to dig and sweat to earn a miserable living while the masters enjoy the fruit of your toil.

I think the big problem is you have a vicious cycle of wealth and power in America that's just gotten completely out of control and you've seen it in politics.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town, I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, But is there because he's a victim of the times. I wear the black for those who never read

L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it's simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won't have to hear the screams of the drowning.

Instead, we have found ourselves gasping for air in a sea of corruption, dysfunction, environmental degradation, waste, disenchantment and inequality—and the harder we compete, the more unequal we become.

Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just - when all along we knew it wasn't.

It would, I think, be hard for anyone to make the case that the United States is a just society or anything close to a just society. In America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant.

The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle predicts almost everything that's happening.

In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.

And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.

So long as millions of human beings in every country has to sell their labour-power to a small minority of owners, and to sink into the most wretched misery if they could find no buyers, the so called “equality before the law” remains a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth. But in the same way there can also be no talk of a “right over one's own person,” for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the economic dictation of another if he does not want to starve.

I suspect that over time we will rely increasingly, or take notice at least increasingly, on international and foreign courts in examining domestic issues. [Doing so] may not only enrich our own country's decisions, I think it may create that all important good impression.

There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.

There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful.

People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley].

The root cause of poverty is social injustice and the bad government that abets it

I think our biggest problem in society is we're headed more and more toward a two-tiered society. That is, creating welfare for the wealthy and destroying opportunities for the disadvantaged.

As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.