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"Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought."
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"If a moneyed man had a "corny mind, a flatterer would immediately start chasing him like a hungry hen!"

"An honest government is the childish dream of the gullible men!"

"A country where women are not free has no chance ever to be something good and respectable!"

"It is better to go near the truth and be imprisoned than to stay with the wrong and roam about freely, master Galilei. In fact, getting attached to falsity is terrible slavery, and real freedom is only next to the right."

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."

"Foulmouthed individuals seem to have their neuron systems replaced by colon structures, given that their terminology profusely consists of "sh*t and f*ck". ['Tolerance zero']"

"The walls, where there was room, were well decorated with calendars and posters showing bright, improbable girls with pumped-up breasts and no hips - blondes, brunettes and redheads, but always with this bust development, so that a visitor of another species might judge from the preoccupation of artist and audience that the seat of procreation lay in the mammaries. Alice Chicoy...who worked among the shining girls, was wide-hipped and sag-chested and she walked well back on her heels...She was not in the least jealous of the calendar girls and the Coca-Cola girls. She had never seen anyone like them, and she didn't think anyone ever had."
Explore more quotes by Jose Saramago

"Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt."

"The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975."

"I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined."

"Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?"

"Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up."

"I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends."

"In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays."

"Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer."

"A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction."

"Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is."
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