Mario Benedetti Quotes

'New Jack City' and 'Boyz 'N the Hood' are realities, but movies like 'Strictly Business' are realities, too.

My grandmother and my mom and my aunt Aurelia, my grandmother Juanita, my mom Lucia - we lived on the outskirts of a barrio in Mexico City called Tepito, and Tepito for many, many decades was the largest barrio in Mexico and perhaps even Latin America.

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.

So that I saw music as a way of documenting realities from the urban cities of Latin America.

We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.

I saw so many radically different versions of Iraq. It would have been difficult for me to come back and think, 'This is the Iraq experience.'

Sometimes people who want to understand Haiti from a political perspective may be missing part of the picture. They also need to look at Haiti from a psychological perspective.

In one aspect, my works record the history of the development of Chinese society. Concern about the situation of Chinese reality is one important theme of my works. I am trying to ask, 'How does our society develop? What are the problems in our society? Where is our direction leading?'

I think some of the things I deal with Hopper probably has dealt with also, since it's somewhat the same environment and I have pretty strong reactions to what this country looks like. It looks pretty dull and spare, and you like this and dislike it and it's very complicated.

I was the first person to come into New York with a Latin American point of view which was also very much influenced by political happenings in Latin America.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

It was not until I got down to Latin America that I began to get a political education. Whatever my ideas when I went down there, I saw things around me every day that influenced me. I saw the terrible economic and social conditions, and the injustices that could not be ignored.

Our history is responsible for the differences in the South African way of life.

I think the best thing I can say about it - and I think the best thing you can say about anything, really - is that 'The Motorcycle Diaries' made me feel like my home was bigger; it made me feel at home anywhere in Latin America.

Social struggles have been taking place throughout millennia, since human beings, by resorting to wars, were able to take hold of a surplus production to satisfy the essential needs of life.

Madurai is a city with a long political history. It was at the centre of the anti-Brahmin movement, the anti-Hindi movement, the Dravidian movement, and was a pro-LTTE city. Yet, this city has elected me, the very antithesis of all these movements.

The social realism of ' Establishment Blues' or 'Like Janis,' are what I chose to use to express what was happening in the U.S. and what was happening to me personally.

If you or I had lived 500 years ago, our worldview, and the decisions we made as a result, would have been utterly different. Our minds are shaped by our social environment, in particular the belief systems projected by those in power: monarchs, aristocrats and theologians then; corporations, billionaires and the media today.

My family, my background... it just parallels really nicely with a lot of social and cultural movements.

If I were to say that I grew up in East Los Angeles in the projects, poor, I assumed that everybody understood that it came with its own reasons for being the way I am. I didn't get that people needed to understand where my comedy came from; I thought that they knew that.

Growing up in a specific area has a certain sociological and economic reason, so I'm interested in using myself as a case study to look as those things.

...in any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand.

You must address the historical and political differences in race and ethnicity in this country before you hold tenaciously to insubstantial, and unsubtantiated, beliefs.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

The reality is that we have one of lowest voter turnouts of any major country on earth because so many people have given up on the political process. The reality is that there has been trillions of dollars of wealth going from the middle class in the last 30 years to the top 1/10th of 1 percent.