The 70 best famous phrases of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Manuel Vazquez Montalban (Barcelona, Spain, 1939 - Bangkok, Thailand, 2003) was a prominent Spanish writer and journalist.
Especially famous for detective novels Pepe Carvalho, Vázquez Montalbán was born and grew up in the humble neighborhood of El Raval, in post-war Barcelona. His ingenuity and his deep understanding of social reality made him one of the essential characters of the Spanish 20th century.
- Recommended article: "The 45 best phrases of Eduardo Galeano"
Famous phrases and quotes by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
The Barcelona writer excelled in fields other than Literature and social life. In today's article We are going to know the best phrases of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, as well as the best statements and famous quotes from him.
we started.
1. I sometimes call myself a conservative because I haven't corrected my world view since I turned fifty and decided I was already responsible for my face.
They say that age brings with it a more traditional vision of life, and Vázquez Montalbán was no exception.
2. Assuming miscegenation is as important as claiming the right to difference and reducing the accumulation capacity in exchange for stimulating the development of the increasingly condemned of the land.
A welcoming look towards the emigrants.
3. Against Franco we were better.
The Spanish left lived comfortably criticizing Franco, according to the writer.
4. He promotes the idea of democracy more as a cause than as a consequence. It is not an innocent formulation.
Reflection on the democratic period.
5. The boss is an absurd but essential vice in the political market mobilized by eroticized imaginaries.
A particular opinion on the collective imagination.
6. Marxism continues to survive as a system of analysis, as a method of understanding history, and it is not for nothing that it is the best diagnosis of capitalism that has been made up to now.
His vision of Karl Marx and his legacy.
7. The movement is demonstrated by fleeing (excerpt from an interview with his son Daniel Vázquez Sallés).
Probably referring to when he was escaping from the greys.
8. The only truly standardizing Mediterranean product, and perhaps one day unifying, is the presence of the aubergine in all culinary cultures, from Syria to Murcia, from Viareggio to Tunisia.
A food that is not lacking in any of the Mediterranean culinary cultures.
9. In times of crisis of certainties and dogmas, what would be of us without metaphors and without vices?
Saved by literature and by nightlife.
10. Everything we touch and breathe is capitalism.
Virtually nothing escapes.
11. We have gone from the concessionary media machine, directly or indirectly controlled by the State, to the machine market media, in which the law of supply and demand establishes that the most powerful end up control it.
Power knows no borders.
12. The elaboration of culture, and especially culture as heritage, has logically corresponded to intellectuals linked to the ruling classes.
Power extends its tentacles to rewrite culture.
13. Nostalgia is the censorship of memory. (Quoted by his son)
A phrase that Vázquez Sallés rescued.
14. The vanguard does not go through trying to define the truth, but rather by not telling each other lies.
Something is earned, even if it is a saving in lies and lies.
15. The only providential thing is death, and everything else is instinct and culture.
This is how this Barcelona writer saw life and death.
16. The gods are gone, we have television.
A pretty pitiful substitute.
17. We aged rationalists with a melancholy at the end of the millennium confirm once again that vices, like clichés, are no less necessary because they are absurd: We need bosses so we don't believe in ourselves and we need already known dangers because we sense that those we still don't dare to face are much worse. know.
A reflection on the human condition.
18. I admit that I am sensitive to the argument that we enlightened left-wing bourgeois take pleasure in distant revolutions, those uncomfortable revolutions that we would not want to interpret as protagonists.
From the ivory tower it is easier to give an opinion.
19. There are no unique truths, nor final struggles, but it is still possible to orient ourselves through the possible truths against the evident non-truths and fight against them.
About the truth and its different ins and outs.
20. For liberalism, eradicating historical memory means leaving the most contemporary History without culprits, without causes.
A critique of liberal thought and its short interpretation of history.
21. For the vast majority of human beings, after finishing Basic General Education, their conscience will depend on the direct clash with reality and the information media.
The two ways of building political and social awareness, according to Vázquez Montalbán.
22. The husbands of beautiful women are doomed to be eternally underestimated by those who consider themselves more gifted than they are to aspire to the award.
A sample of machismo of the 20th century.
23. Since we are in a market economy and cultural reality, we are not only consumers of detergents or cans of beer with or without alcohol, but also messages, truths, ideology, information.
From product to ideas.
24. I claim, together with the need for external consciousness, the meaning of history. But knowing that it is conventional, rejecting any providential legitimacy.
A materialist position on the future of civilizations.
25. We are taught that the inevitable conflict of the future will preferably be due to clashes of civilizations because It would be a metaphysical digression to suppose that the unified market world can fight over material issues of class.
On the possibility of revolutions in the era of global capitalism.
26. If there is still a certain capacity to set progressive criteria in education, apply it to introducing the compulsory teaching of media decoding.
Promote the conscious and measured consumption of information, a great pending task.
27. If the system insists on considering the citizen a potential client and consumer, we could do a good job this logic and propose an active militancy of clients and consumers turned into computerized unsubmissive
A formula to fight against an invisible oppression.
28. Soccer is the most widespread religion designed in the 20th century on the planet.
The sport of the masses, and the opium of the people.
29. Melancholy is an ancient and wise disease capable of living with us, of slowly self-destructing.
Melancholy can leave us anchored in the past,
30. We are the ones who travel and we have the right to touch the myths.
Nothing in the cultural roots of a nation is unchangeable.
31. Pleasure trips do not interest us. We believe in globalization... in the suffered.
A more globalized world does not always mean more freedom of movement.
32. The magic of culturally obligatory places comes from the impact they cause when they enter our memory.
The sensations that arise for the first time when accessing certain places is what gives them a special symbolic charge.
33. Fugitives from scarcity that bounced against the walls of a rich and toothed Europe.
About migrants.
34. The good health of optimistic capitalism and its best historical subject of change: the fugitive man.
This is how this writer defined the future of the capitalist economic system.
35. Suddenly I thought that my new experiences would never be as total, as magnificent as those of the first trip.
The first times have a special aura.
36. Boss, we are living a fragment of a book.
Brutal phrase to demystify reality.
37. Never was any century so unfortunate. He knew almost everything to improve the human condition and he did not fix any major deficit.
On the miseries of the 20th century.
38. His return to the world had to take place in a certain space of time, otherwise, it would become a trip of no return.
Another paragraph taken from one of Pepe Carvalho's novels.
39. We are in South America practically bleached. The extermination of the indigenous has been total... The settlers offered a reward to anyone who had killed an indigenous person and took their ears as a trophy.
On the slaughter of the colonists in American lands.
40. The cruelty of conquest and colonization is the basis of a dialectic that has not ceased and that has led peoples and individuals to misery.
Mainly referred to Latin America.
41. The new president of Brazil, Lula, is going to fight against hunger, and the still unfortunate president of this country, Duhalde, has spoken out against hunger. In Argentina, hunger. It's like imagining the snowy tropics...
Demonstrating his admiration for the one who was president of Brazil.
42. They tended to turn their historical spaces into amusement parks for memory and culture.
About a place visited by Montalbán.
43. Greece was another country that had not made the Industrial Revolution at the time and, like Spain, still depended on colonels and the priests, the singers and the exiles who exhibited in Paris the purple and swollen nudity of postponed or tortured Greece.
Two countries in perpetual industrial backwardness.
44. Carvalho endured the teacher's gaze, in case he was translating the possible sarcasm in those words, but it was a frank and devoted look, an expert in arousing confidence…. There will come a day when we can prevent empires.
Extract from one of Pepe Carvalho's novels.
45. Literature, for me, is a therapeutic resource.
A kind of self-managed therapy.
46. Everything that is good for me is bad for my health.
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's health was always delicate.
47. You have to drink to remember and eat to forget.
Undoing the famous phrase and turning it around.
48. One aspect that I perceive with hindsight, once the original has been read and reread, is that, together and added, these characters could pose for a final transition photograph. But I do not insist on this intuition because I believe that everything and everyone is in perpetual transition.
To reflect on literature and the magic of the characters.
49. The husband is, after the dog, the least valued domestic animal that exists.
Great and ironic sentence.
50. The size of the eyes is a congenital condition, but the way of looking at the world is not.
A nice phrase about relativism.
51. Every time the television commented on the socialist victory, such a delicate lady roared, with that poor class education and history that our oligarchy has acquired under Francoism, that instinct of arrogance and impunity that gave them victory, that right of conquest that is exercised over a territory or over a small television room where you don't care what others may think the rest.
A chronicle of the years after the death of the dictator Franco.
52. The opposition youth who jumped on the bandwagon of political transition have had little to do with it. They have behaved more like a bunch of fools, as if they were continuing to perform in a faculty assembly.
About the politicians of 30 years ago.
53. Admit that it is more elegant to suppress with ideas than with the hands.
Paradoxical affirmation, full of irony, of the great Vázquez Montalbán.
54. The West has run out of philosophers and those that exist are dedicated to intrusion into the territory of opinion journalism, they are commentators on what is happening. And the place once occupied by the philosophers is now held by the economists, scholastic administrators of the last truths. absolute: the zero degree of development, the exhaustion of the industrial revolution, the advent of the technological revolution and the obsolescence of a culture, that is to say, of a social conscience built to understand relations of hasty production within ten, twenty years.
On the scarcity of thinkers at the present stage.
55. Calculating now the life expectancy that exists in some places, that is ten generations, that is, we have little left before we all go to hell.
This is how things go if we don't remedy it.
56. If globalization is understood as looking for a soft word to reflect what we used to call imperialism, then that is another question.
A linguistic question.
57. History belongs to those who prolong it, not to those who hijack it.
A way of affirming that only progress dignifies and gives its name to history.
58. The gestures of politicians is a language that becomes a message, it is what makes it connect with the public. But you cannot live only on gestures. We must rekindle the relationship between politicians and citizens based on content.
A reflection on the substance and the form in politics.
59. When it comes to needs that affect the vast majority of the population, which could be resolved with the scientific and technical development that we have, then it is no longer a utopia. It is the verification of what is necessary. Given this, the right to rebellion and struggle seems legitimate to me.
About the use of violence.
60. It is not the same to contemplate the globalized world economy from the North American perspective or from the Monetary Fund, than from a community in the Lacandona jungle.
Each place has its own way of suffering and interpreting macroeconomic reality.
61. When they present globalization as a neutral integrating term, it is not true, they are "lentils, if you want them, take them and if you don't, leave them."
His reflection on the new world order.
62. At the moment they have tried to turn the crisis in Israel and Palestine into one more aspect of the fight against terrorism, when ultimately it is a fight between rich and poor.
The Palestinian-Israeli problem in the eyes of Vázquez Montalbán.
63. I still believe in the division of labor, that if a few of us practice a job that consists of accumulating knowledge and distributing it through language, that implies a social responsibility.
An interesting idea about the economy of culture.
64. You cannot write poetry denouncing Bush, or turn the novel into a territory of ideological disclosure. But you don't have to hide what you think either, because politics is also a literary subject.
His vision of literature and ideology.
65. 9/11 is the great pretext they have to start hitting everything that is contrary to the system.
The violence against this social movement was a reason for condemnation.
66. If young critics appear, they have it more difficult than us, because they are no longer judged from a dictatorship that condemns them, but from what the market asks or does not ask for.
On the law of the market and youth without a future.
67. One of the cultural successes of the right in the last quarter century has been to destroy the idea of hope and the idea of the future.
On the stage of José María Aznar.
68. Making a list of NGOs is like an inventory of the mess in the world.
Great reflection of the Barcelona writer.
69. 9/11 leads them to create the design of the new enemy, which before was the communist and now would be terrorism.
About the 2001 attacks and how the US machine used that to shape a new political dialectic on a global scale.
70. I have never been a good revolutionary, even Marcos rejected the revolutionary label and said insubmissive.
On his leftist past.