Jose Mujica

“I give myself the luxury of saying what I want.”

“I'm just sick of the way things are. We're in an age in which we can't live without accepting the logic of the market. Contemporary politics is all about short-term pragmatism. We have abandoned religion and philosophy... What we have left is the automatisation of doing what the market tells us.”

“I am an austere president.”

“If the inmates of Guantanamo want to make their nests in Uruguay, they can do it.”

“The world cries out for global rules that respect the achievements of science.”

“Publicly, I've never talked about Argentina.”

“I know prisons from the inside.”

“I'm called 'the poorest president', but I don't feel poor.”

“No addiction is good.”

“The world will always need revolution. That doesn't mean shooting and violence. A revolution is when you change your thinking. Confucianism and Christianity were both revolutionary.”

“Any North American state is more important than Uruguay, in dimensions, in its economic force.”

“My years in jail were a bit like a workshop for my - that actually forged my way of thinking and my values.”

“Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.”

“There are people who say that you can't experiment... That condemns you to failure.”

“When you have a lot of solitude, any living thing becomes a companion.”

“I don't want to be an apologist for poverty, but I can't stand waste, useless spending, wasted energy and having to live squandering stuff.”

“There are those who believe that power is up above, and they don't notice that it's actually in the hearts of the great masses.”

“I'll shout it if they want: Down with isms! Up with a Left that is capable of thinking outside the box! In other words, I am more than completely cured of simplifications, of dividing the world into good and evil, of thinking in black and white. I have repented!”

“Fascism in Uruguay did not begin just with the military coup of 1973, but years before, even when there was still a government with a constitution and parliament.”

“If I worried about pollsters, I wouldn't be president.”