Carlos Fuentes Quotes

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.

Haiti is 10.4-million people, of whom 35 per cent are children under 15. The country has always had great potential - and this is still the case. Our ill fortune has long been a matter of bad governance. And now things have changed.

The fact that some poor, illiterate people have ‘gone Communist’ does not prove that poverty caused them to do so.

The people are starving. They need food; they need medicine; they need education. They do not need a skyscraper to house the ruling party and a 24-hour TV station.

…In certain parts of Latin America, the seizure of the vast majority of the wealth by an oligarchy of owners bereft of social consciousness, the practical absence or the shortcomings of a rule of law, military dictators making a mockery of elementary human rights, the corruption of certain powerful officials, the savage practices of some foreign capital interests constitute factors which nourish a passion for revolt among those who thus consider themselves the powerless victims of a new colonialism in the technological, financial, monetary, or economic order.

In our tribal areas the literacy rate among women is 3%; among men, 17%; and there is no economy.

Go to the streets and ask for work. If they don’t give you work, ask for bread. If they don’t give you bread, then take it.

My father, he couldn't read or write.

My mum didn't understand that education was an important thing. She couldn't do my homework with me. I was helping her read stuff. She once brought shaving soap thinking it was whipped cream.

The disparity between the haves and have-nots was always blatantly obvious to me, and it's that exact gap that drove me to start writing and pick up a pen. I wanted to explain and understand the world around me because it was easy to see it was corrupted.

Many people today in the developed countries are so far removed from poverty and suffering and starvation that they lack empathy for the sufferings of others.

The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country - far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.

It’s scandalous when one thinks about the people who live in a world in which they need not be hungry, in which they need not die without medical care, in which they need not be illiterate, they need not feel hopeless and miserable so much of the time, and yet they are.

Men aren't able to find jobs anymore, and they're withdrawing from society, essentially creating a matriarchy. For the upper social classes, marriage is still a successful model, but for poorer people it's not.

The United States of America is the richest country in the world; yet we're the worst at taking care of poor people.

Foreign aid goes from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

Revolutions are not exportable: revolutions are created by oppressive conditions which Latin American countries exercise against their peoples.

Things have changed in Latin America now. We mostly have democratic governments in Latin America, so the position of the writer has changed. It is not as Neruda used to say, that a Latin American writer walks around with the body of his people on his back. Now, we have citizens, we have public means of expression, political parties, congress, unions. So, the writer's position has changed, we now consider ourselves to be citizens - not spokespeople for everybody - but citizens that participate in the political and social process of the country.

I am saying the same to Muslims in the global South, telling them: "Just ignore what is done." However, in the Southern countries they are not living in a comfortable society like you and me. They deal with unemployment, corruption, and surviving. For the majority of them, their religion is helping them survive.

We on the left have forgotten that the question is not how do you get good people to rule, most people who rule are mediocre at best and usually venal. The question is how do we make those in power frightened of us and not be seduced by formal political processes.

I really want to move to a country where the poor people are fat.

There are tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people living in poverty and danger who might readily seek to enter a Western country if the opportunity is there.

Latin Americans have gotten tired of the Washington consensus - a neoliberalism that has aggravated misery and poverty.

It was shameful that, after Haiti, Colombia was the second most unequal country in Latin America. But we've achieved some things; the inequality is coming down, and coming down fast. The growing economy has provided us with the funds to finance a very progressive social policy that has reduced extreme poverty. We have the lowest inflation rate of all Latin-America countries and the highest growth rate.

For that reason the simple test of the slogan 'Consume Less' as a basis for social action on the environment would be to tell it to the blacks in the ghetto. The message will not be very well received for there are many people in this country who consume less than is needed to sustain a decent life.