641 Quotes by José Saramago

Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you’re saying you have a political conscience but you don’t agree with any of the existing parties.

Every thing in life is a uniform; the only time our bodies are truly in civilian dress is when we’re naked.

We live in a very peculiar world. Democracy isn’t discussed, as if it was taken for granted, as if democracy had taken God’s place, who is also not discussed.

As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved – it’s the citizen who changes things.

Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that’s why laws were created.

We say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one’s courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species.

You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it’s time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.

People might ask me, What do you propose instead? I propose nothing. I am a mere novelist, I just write about the world as I see it. It is not my job to transform it. I cannot transform it all by myself, and I wouldn’t even know how to. I limit myself to saying what I believe the world to be.

The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.