Jose Mujica
Jose Mujica
José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica Cordanois a Uruguayan politician who was the 40th President of Uruguay between 2010 and 2015. A former urban guerrilla fighter with the Tupamaros, he was imprisoned for 13 years during the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. A member of the Broad Front coalition of left-wing parties, Mujica was Minister of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries from 2005 to 2008 and a Senator afterwards. As the candidate of the Broad Front, he won the 2009 presidential...
NationalityUruguayan
ProfessionStatesman
Date of Birth20 May 1935
CountryUruguay
I was no assassin. I got out during the amnesty because I had not committed any violent crimes.
I never killed anyone because it wasn't necessary. I could have killed.
In life you can fall down 1000 times but the point is to have the willingness to stand up and to start again.
Worse that drugs is drug trafficking. Much worse. Drugs are a disease, and I don't think that there are good drugs or that marijuana is good. Nor cigarettes. No addiction is good. I include alcohol. The only good addiction is love. Forget everything else.
What was my great sin? To have revealed the private property of the bank - well if this is being a criminal, then maybe I'm a great criminal.
There are people who say that you can't experiment... That condemns you to failure.
As soon as politicians start climbing up the ladder, they suddenly become kings. I don't know how it works, but what I do know is that republics came to the world to make sure that no one is more than anyone else. The pomp of office is like something left over from a feudal past: "You need a palace, red carpet, a lot of people behind you saying, 'Yes, sir.' I think all of that is awful."
A president is a high-level official who is elected to carry out a function. He is not a king, not a god. He is not the witch doctor of a tribe who knows everything. He is a civil servant. I think the ideal way of living is to live like the vast majority of people whom we attempt to serve and represent.
This is a matter of freedom. If you don't have many possessions then you don't need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself,
We applied a very simple principle: Recognize the facts. Abortion is old as the world. Gay marriage, please - it's older than the world. We had Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, please. To say it's modern, come on, it's older than we are. It's an objective reality that it exists. For us, not legalizing it would be to torture people needlessly.
Uruguay is a country which has grown from immigration, people from all over. That is our origin.
Between madness and sanity, there is a shifting boundary. It is impossible to explain. Time slows down and you have to try to fill it. You don't have anything but solitude.
I'm not the poorest president. The poorest is the one who needs a lot to live. My lifestyle is a consequence of my wounds. I'm the son of my history. There have been years when I would have been happy just to have a mattress.
We can almost recycle everything now. If we lived within our means, by being prudent, the 7 billion people in the world could have everything they needed. Global politics should be moving in that direction. But we think as people and countries, not as a species.