The 70 Best Famous Phrases By Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (Barcelona, Spain, 1939 – Bangkok, Thailand, 2003) was a prominent Spanish writer and journalist.
Especially famous for the novels of detective Pepe Carvalho, Vázquez Montalbán was born and raised in the humble neighborhood of El Raval, in post-war Barcelona. His ingenuity and deep understanding of social reality made him one of the essential characters of the Spanish 20th century.
Famous phrases and quotes by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
The Barcelona writer stood out in fields other than Literature and social life. In today’s article Let’s get to know the best phrases of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán as well as his best statements and famous quotes.
1. I sometimes call myself conservative because I haven’t corrected my view of the world since I turned fifty and decided I was already responsible for my face.
They often say that age brings with it a more traditional view of life, and Vázquez Montalbán was no exception.
2. Assuming miscegenation is as important as claiming the right to difference and reducing the capacity for accumulation in exchange for stimulating the development of the increasingly condemned on the earth.
A welcoming look at emigrants.
3. Against Franco we were better.
The Spanish left lived comfortably criticizing Franco, according to the writer.
4. The idea of democracy spreads 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; it is not for nothing that it is the best diagnosis that has been made of capitalism so far.
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 grays.
8. The only truly standardizing Mediterranean product, and perhaps one day unifying, is the presence of the eggplant in all culinary cultures, from Syria to Murcia, from Viareggio to Tunisia.
A food that is not missing in any of the Mediterranean culinary cultures.
9. In times of crisis of certainties and dogmas, what would become of us without metaphors and vices?
Saved by literature and nightlife.
10. Everything we touch and breathe is capitalism.
Virtually nothing escapes.
11. We have gone from the concessionary media machine, controlled by the State directly or indirectly, to the market media machine, in which the law of supply and demand establishes that the most powerful end up controlling it.
Power knows no borders.
12. The elaboration of culture, and especially culture as heritage, has logically corresponded to intellectuals linked to the dominant 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 avant-garde is not about trying to delimit the truth, but about not telling more lies to each other.
Something is gained, even if it is a saving in lies and lies.
15. The only providential thing is death, and everything else instinct and culture.
This is how this Barcelona writer saw life and death.
16. The gods have left, we have television left.
A rather deplorable substitute.
17. We aging rationalists with end-of-millennium melancholy see once again that vices, like clichés, are no less necessary because they are absurd: we need bosses to not believe in ourselves and we need already known dangers because we sense that they are much worse. those that we still do not dare to know.
A reflection on the human condition.
18. I admit that I am sensitive to the argument that we enlightened left-wing bourgeois take solace in distant revolutions, those uncomfortable revolutions that we would not like to interpret as protagonists.
From the ivory tower it is easier to give your opinion.
19. There are no unique truths, nor final struggles, but it is still possible to orient ourselves through possible truths against obvious non-truths and fight against them.
About the truth and its different nooks and crannies.
20. For liberalism, extirpating 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, once Basic General Education has been completed, their consciousness will depend on the direct collision with reality and the media.
The two ways of building political and social consciousness, according to Vázquez Montalbán.
22. The husbands of beautiful women are condemned to be eternally despised by those who consider themselves more gifted than them 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 of messages, truths, ideology, and information.
From product to ideas.
24. I claim, along with the need for external consciousness, the meaning of history. But knowing that it is conventional, rejecting any providentialist legitimation.
A materialist position on the future of civilizations.
25. We are instilled that the inevitable conflict in the future will preferably result from clashes of civilizations because it would be a metaphysical digression to suppose that the unified market world can fight over material class issues.
On the possibility of revolutions in the era of global capitalism.
26. If there is still a certain capacity to establish progressive criteria in education, let it be applied to introducing compulsory teaching of media decoding.
Promoting 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 make good this logic and propose an active militancy of clients and consumers converted into rebellious computerized people.
A formula to fight against invisible oppression.
28. Football 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 illness capable of living with us, of slowly self-destructing us.
Melancholy can leave us stuck 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 suffering.
A more globalized world does not always mean more freedom of movement.
32. The magic of culturally obligatory places comes from the impact they caused when they entered our memory.
The sensations that arise for the first time when entering certain places are what give them a special symbolic charge.
33. Fugitives from scarcity who 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. I suddenly 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. No century has ever been so unfortunate. He knew almost everything to improve the human condition and did not fix any major deficits.
About the miseries of the 20th century.
38. His return to the world had to take place within a certain period of time, otherwise it would become a journey with no return.
Another paragraph taken from one of Pepe Carvalho’s novels.
39. We are in practically whitened South America. The extermination of the indigenous people has been total… The settlers offered a reward to anyone who had killed an indigenous person and took the ears as a trophy.
About the massacre of settlers on American lands.
40. The cruelty of conquest and colonization is the basis of a dialectic that has not ceased and that has led people and people to misery.
Mainly referring 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 former president of Brazil.
42. They tended to convert their historical spaces into amusement parks for memory and culture.
About some place visited by Montalbán.
43. Greece was another country that had not undergone the Industrial Revolution at the time and, like Spain, still depended on the colonels and the priests, the singers and the exiles who exhibited in Paris the purple and swollen nakedness of Greece. postponed or tortured.
Two countries in perpetual industrial backwardness.
44. Carvalho endured the professor’s gaze, in case he conveyed the possible sarcasm in those words, but it was a frank and dedicated look, an expert in arousing trust… 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 a posteriori, once I have read and reread the original, is that, together and added together, these characters could pose for a final transitional 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 bad education of class and history that our oligarchy has acquired under Franco, that instinct of arrogance and impunity that victory gave them, that right of conquest that is exercised over a territory or over a little television room where you don’t care what others think.
A chronicle of the years after the death of the dictator Franco.
52. The young people in the opposition who jumped on the political transition bandwagon have had little to do with it. They have behaved more like a bunch of fools, as if they were continuing to act at a faculty assembly.
About the politicians of 30 years ago.
53. Admit that it is more elegant to repress with your ideas than with your hands.
Paradoxical statement, loaded with irony, by the great Vázquez Montalbán.
54. The West has run out of philosophers and those that exist are dedicated to intrusion in the territory of opinion journalism, they are commentators on what is happening. And the place once occupied by philosophers is now held by economists who are scholastic administrators of the last absolute truths: 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, of a social consciousness built to understand relations of precipitated production within ten, twenty years.
About the shortage of thinkers at the current stage.
55. Now calculating the life expectancy 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, that is another question.
A linguistic question.
57. History belongs to those who prolong it, not to those who hijack it.
A way of stating that only progress dignifies and gives its name to history.
58. The gestures of politicians are a language that becomes a message, it is what makes them connect with the public. But you can’t live on gestures alone. We must revive the relationship between politicians and citizens based on content.
A reflection on the substance and 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 confirmation of what is necessary. Given that, 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, as it is 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, integrative term, it is not true, they are “lentils, if you want them you take them and if you don’t you leave them.”
His reflection on the new world order.
62. For now they have tried to turn the crisis in Israel and Palestine into another aspect of the fight against terrorism, when ultimately it is a fight between the rich and the poor.
The Palestinian-Israeli problem in the eyes of Vázquez Montalbán.
63. I continue to 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 dissemination. But you don’t have to hide what you think either, because politics is also a literary subject.
His vision on literature and ideology.
65. 9/11 is the great pretext they have to start attacking everything that is contrary to the system.
The violence against this social movement was cause 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.
About the law of the market and youth without a future.
67. One of the cultural successes of the right in the last quarter of a century has been to destroy the idea of hope and the idea of the future.
About the period of José María Aznar.
68. Making a list of NGOs is like an inventory of the world’s disorder.
Great reflection from the Barcelona writer.
69. 9/11 led 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 machinery 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 called insubordinates.
