Chilean Quotes & Sayings

It is not that the average is never useful. Averages have their place. If you're comparing two different groups of people, like comparing the performance of Chilean pilots with French pilots - as opposed to comparing two individuals from each of those groups - then the average can be useful. But the moment you need a pilot, or a plumber, or a doctor, the moment you need to teach this child or decide whether to hire that employee - the moment you need to make a decision about any individual - the average is useless. Worse than useless, in fact, because it creates the illusion of knowledge, when in fact the average disguises what is most important about an individual. — Todd Rose

You shall create beauty not to excite the senses
but to give sustenance to the soul. — Gabriela Mistral

As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan.

I don't know really.

All of those myths that we impose on ourselves - and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity - are very harmful.

Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we'll be just, well, cosmopolitans. — Jorge Luis Borges

There is something eminently Chilean about avoiding confrontation, or about not clarifying the way you feel sometimes. It's a particular culture, where emotions are not discussed as profusely with your family or friends, nor shown in an explicit manner. — Omar Zuniga

Psycholinguists argue about whether language reflects our perception of reality or helps create them. I am in the latter camp. Take the names we give the animals we eat. The Patagonian toothfish is a prehistoric-looking creature with teeth like needles and bulging yellowish eyes that lives in deep waters off the coast of South America. It did not catch on with sophisticated foodies until an enterprising Los Angeles importer renamed it the considerably more palatable Chilean sea bass. — Hal Herzog

That must have been what I looked like to my doctor friend. That must be what I look like to anyone with a real problem - active-duty soldier, homeless person, Chilean miner, etc. A little tiny person with nothing to worry about running in circles, worried out of her mind. Either way, everything will be fine. — Tina Fey

Marketers have long known that a name can make all the difference when you're trying to move the merch. The kiwifruit was once the Chinese gooseberry, after all - at least until the produce peddlers wised up - and the Chilean sea bass was once the singularly unappetizing Patagonian toothfish. — Jeffrey Kluger

Typical Chilean characteristics, such as sobriety, a horror of ostentation, of standing out over others or attracting attention, generosity, a tendency to compromise rather than confront, a legalistic mentality, respect for authority, resignation to bureaucracy, enthusiasm for political argument, — Isabel Allende

There has been a cultural shift. It is difficult to measure all that right now, but Chilean women have seen my presidency as a source of pride. Women are performing in jobs in Chile now that 20 or 30 years ago nobody would have dared to imagine. — Michelle Bachelet

It will be the mother of all telescopes, and you can bet it will do for astronomy what genome sequencing is doing for biology. The clumsy, if utilitarian, name of this mirrored monster is Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. You can't use it yet, but a peak in the Chilean Andes has been decapitated to provide a level spot for placement. — Seth Shostak

You cannot bribe a Chilean police officer - I know this firsthand. — Hector Tobar

Why is it, he asked, that wherever a Chilean goes in the world, Neruda and his fucking seashells has already been there and set up a monopoly? He held my gaze waiting for me to counter him, and as he did I got the feeling that where he came from it was commonplace to talk as we were talking, an even to argue about poetry to the point of violence, and for a moment I felt brushed by loneliness. — Nicole Krauss

Floating past the Soyuz TV screen, I noticed we were over the Pacific, off the Chilean coast. At the window, I saw few lights: fishing boats, I thought. Then they resolved themselves: the Southern Cross. I was looking at a constellation in the night sky, not the sea! It was a strange delight to be that disconcerted while simultaneously at ease. — Chris Hadfield

I have lived with my conscience and my own memories for over quarter of a century since the events of 1973 ... These are not easy reflections for me. But I am at peace with myself, and with the Chilean people, about what happened. I am clear in my mind that the return to Chile of true democracy, and from that the true freedom to which all individual people are entitled, could not have been achieved without the removal of the Marxist government. — Augusto Pinochet

This is an instrument in the hands of the people for fighting the fascist saboteurs, because the Chilean armed forces are a guarantee of constitutionality and integrity. — Salvador Allende

My family is Chilean, and I was born there. By the time I was four, we were living in San Antonio, Texas, and I just remember picking a blue bonnet and getting yelled at by some guy with a sheriff hat and a badge. I was traumatized. He told me it was the state flower, and I wasn't supposed to be messin' with it. — Pedro Pascal

While it cannot be denied that the state's enhanced role in the mid-twentieth century necessitated a larger bureaucracy, or that the officials of CORFO (for instance) served their country well, the suspicion remains that the expanded public administration was (to adapt the celebrated phrase about the British empire) in part a system of indoor relief for the Chilean middle class. — Simon Collier

I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves. — Henry A. Kissinger

One day you turn and "social studies" has become "Chilean fiefdoms of the fourteenth century" and that's how you know you're in college. — Sloane Crosley

Strawberries in June are ordinary. Still, they are luscious and sweet, all the same. But I was just that: a June strawberry, one of many in a fragrant basket. Not the choicest Chilean import which would grace the cake of a December wedding, or a particularly succulent one, singled out to sweeten a fruity cocktail drink in a swanky bar. — Jocelyne Lebon

I have experience and I am employing it in the service of a Chilean road for Chile's problems. We always take advantage of experience wherever it comes from, but adapting it to our reality. I am putting it to use in a Chilean way, for the problems of Chile. We are not anyone's mental colonists. — Salvador Allende

So Lorenzo grew up in Chile without arms, an unfortunate situation for any child, but he also grew up in Pinochet's Chile, which turned unfortunate situations into desperate ones, on top of which he soon discovered that he was homosexual, which made his already desperate situation inconceivable and indescribable. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Lorenzo became an artist. (What else could he do?) — Roberto Bolano

Bonsai won the Chilean Critics Award for best novel of the year in 2006and it's easy to understand why. — Jonathan Messinger

Along the Chilean coast, with cold and winter,
when rain falls washing the weeks.
Listen: solitude becomes music once more,
and it seems its appearance is that of air, of rain,
that time, something with wave and wings, passes by,
grows. And the harp awakes from oblivion. — Pablo Neruda

This is America. I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, then sliced by a Guatemalan and served by a Venezuelan in a spa where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian. — Stephen Colbert