Eduardo Galeano Quotes

Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.

Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.

Being a foreigner - especially a white and relatively wealthy one - in poor, underdeveloped countries is inherently fraught.

We're not really a state. We're a colony. Everything we've ever had - timber, coal - it's all been extracted out of our state. Our people have been here and have worked in those industries, and they remained poor, but the people outside of our state that are the ones that come and get the timber, get the coal, have become billionaires.

Some people say that the West has a cruel history. These people also may see the achievements of Western countries - in terms of the economy, education, health, and social achievements - as a result of exploitation of poorer countries, including Arab countries. Western nations get rich by using resources such as Arab oil. Meanwhile, the countries supplying them raw materials remain poor. Due to such injustices, jealousies are created.

Africa is a paradox which illustrates and highlights neo-colonialism . Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s impoverishment.

If we use goods made from raw materials that are obtained from a poor country without the proceeds being used to benefit the people of that country, we become complicit in a particularly iniquitous form of grand larceny.

In many ways Africa subsidised America and Europe's development.

As someone from a developing country, I have a problem with rich countries thinking they can tell us anything, simply because they are giving money.

We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.

It is not really our country so much is the problem, it's sort of the parasitic relationship that Canada, and France, and other countries have towards us.

The natural consequence of our submission, even in part, to the system that looks to compelling the export of raw products, the exhaustion of the land, the cheapening of labour, and the export of the labourer.

The U.K. and the U.S. could not have been built today without Africa's aid. It is all the resources that were taken from Africa, including human, that built these countries today! So when they try to give back, we shouldn't be on the defensive.

Africa is rich, and why are we poor then if our continent is rich. It is not right.

There's a belief that since Africa got a raw deal from the colonial West, then the Chinese must be Africa's best friend. But the evidence doesn't show that, and the main criticism is that they are building infrastructure in exchange for Africa's resources in deals that are structured to favor China.

Capitalism has only hurt Latin America.

Wars have ever been but another aristocratic mode of plundering and oppressing commerce.

…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.

The lack of equity and of a sense of solidarity in international transactions works to the advantage of the industrialized nations so that the gulf between the rich and the poor is ever widening. Hence derives the feeling of frustration among third world countries, and the accusations of exploitation and economic colonialism brought against the industrialized nations.

We will not tolerate being cheap labor for industrialized nations, and the purchase of our national resources to be taken abroad.

It is no wonder that the Spanish dependencies languished, in spite of their infinite potentialities of wealth and prosperity. The narrow and selfish policy of the mother country deprived the colonists of all incentives to exertion; the officials sent from Spain enriched themselves, the tax- gatherers seized all superfluous earnings; there were no accumulation of capital and no advancement.

There is a dismal record of failure in Africa on the part of the developed world that shocks and shames our civilization.

The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history. Thus, the peoples believe less and less in statements and promises.

We have to stop letting people come in here and make millionaires and billionaires of themselves off of West Virginia while West Virginia remains poor.

To the extent that the West is to blame at all for the ills of the Third World it is to the extent that the West created Marx and his successors, among whom must be numbered many of those who advised the Third World leaders in post-war years.