Guatemala Best Quotes & Sayings

Land ownership in Guatemala is more unequal than anywhere else in Latin America. Roughly 90 percent of Guatemalan farms are too small to support a family. A tiny group of Guatemalans owns a third of the country's arable land; more than 300,000 landless peasants must scrounge a living as best they can. — Stephen Kinzer

A British traveler remarked, 'There are [fashions in Guatemala] which it would require more than common charity to speak of with respect ... '
FILL IN YOUR OWN GRIPES! ;-) — Paul Theroux

On first acquaintance, the mystery of the Mayans of Guatemala can seem simply bizarre, as it was when I first encountered Maximon the god. — Nick Davies

My son, who is five, was adopted from Ethiopia. My daughter was adopted from Guatemala. Her parents died of typhoid and malaria. We got her from an orphanage. They are the lights of my life. — Lisa Kristine

What really terrifies Americans is the prospect that the Indian is very much alive, that the Indian is having nine babies in Guatemala, and that those nine babies are headed this way. This is one reason why Americans hold on so dearly to the myth of the dead Indian. — Richard Rodriguez

After installing friendly leaders in Iran and Guatemala, the United States lost interest in promoting democracy in either country. — Stephen Kinzer

There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed. — John Negroponte

If you do something and it proves to be a success, then people go 'get him to do that type of thing again, but only slightly different'. Either you do that or you go 'No! I want to play a leprous, lesbian dwarf from Guatemala!' But those parts just aren't coming to me. — Jack Davenport

It is not possible to conceive a democratic Guatemala, free and independent, without the indigenous identity shaping its character into all aspects of national existence. — Rigoberta Menchu

On Aug. 19, 1953, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran became the first victim of a C.I.A. coup. Ten months later, on June 27, 1954, President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala became the second. — Stephen Kinzer

Guatemala's ornate presidential palace, once a terrifying fortress whose every corridor was patrolled by heavily armed soldiers in berets and camouflage uniforms, is now a normal public building where ordinary citizens enter without fear. — Stephen Kinzer

When you have a democratically elected president of Iran you don't topple him for the Shah. You don't help topple Arbenz in Guatemala. You don't do what we did in Vietnam, etc. — Matt Gonzalez

Damn it. Why didn't the United States know when to declare a real war? Those running the country he loved were making a mockery of it. Misusing the word war had become a joke, like The War on Drugs or The War on Women. What was taking place in Guatemala was being run the same way as the fake War on Terror. Similar to Afghanistan, it didn't take long before he realized he was in a no man's land where the dead piled up in silence and the living had nothing to say. Hordes of beggars and gang members roamed the area seeking food, money or young women to rape. Life was cheap. People were killed for a pair of shoes or a handful of pills. — Ava Armstrong

Why were we so full of hope in those days? Looking back, I see so clearly that violence was worsening. Living through that time, we didn't see that. We believed in our capacity to grow a great country. A just society. — Kaimana Wolff

El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras have all agreed to send additional consular officers from Guatemala, from Honduras, from El Salvador, send them to the U.S. border so that we can more quickly and humanely identify unaccompanied children and process their individual removal. — Joe Biden

I know about the torture and assassination, Detective Galiano. That's why I'm in Guatemala. — Kathy Reichs

You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school. — Werner Herzog

I'm living in a dream. I really consider myself really lucky. I was born and raised in Guatemala, in a village, where to go to the market you have to take two buses or drive about 20 minutes if you are lucky enough to have a car. I grew up very, very poor and I didn't even know that being an actor could be a career. — Erick Chavarria

We live in a capitalist system; anyone who believes they are above this system or purer than this system, even while shopping at the cute organic market across the street or taking a hiking vacation to Guatemala, is certifiable. — Katy Lederer

I have seen children shot in El Salvador, Algeria, Guatemala, Sarajevo, but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport. — Chris Hedges

Soft rock music isn't rock, and it ain't music. It's just soft. — George Carlin

Guatemala commends the visionary decision of the citizens of Colorado and Washington — Otto Perez Molina

The Indians are a marginal people in Guatemala just like I am a marginal person in the first world. — Luis Gonzalez

It's very hard to try to be a cultural ... people who organize cultural things ... it's very complicated. And more so in a country like Guatemala. — Luis Gonzalez

I can tell you exactly where the economy is going. It's going to China, Honduras, Guatemala, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cipan, and any other place where you can pay people peanuts and have them work like dogs. — Henry Rollins

I grow up in the States, in Miami, but I was born in Guatemala, and my father's Cuban, and in 'Body of Lies,' I played an Iraqi. — Oscar Isaac

I went to Guatemala to help build a school but left wondering what "help" would really look like... I hadn't prepared myself for how humbled I'd feel, or how hard it would be to find my footing when witnessing a cycle of poverty that seemed to defy any sort of help. — Dee Williams

All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala. — Lynne Truss

But I don't shut up and I don't die.
I live
and fight, maddening
those who rule my country.
For if I live
I fight,
and if I fight
I contribute to the dawn. — Otto Rene Castillo

Navajo infants get so attached to cradleboard that they cry to be tied into it. Kikuyu infants in Kenya get handed around several"mothers," all wives to one man ... Mothers in rural Guatemala keep their infants quiet, in dark huts. Middle-class American mothers talk a blue streak at them. Israeli kibbutz mothers give them over to a communal caretaker ... Japanese mothers sleep with them ... All these tactics are compatible with normal health
physical and mental
and development in infancy. So one lesson for parents so far seems to be: Let a hundred flowers bloom. — Melvin Konner

I am a postmodern romantic. I try to use their way to photograph, and at the same time, incorporate the problems that I feel in a country like Guatemala. — Luis Gonzalez

Like Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Paraguay and others, Mexico believes that we should evaluate internationally agreed upon policies and search for a more effective and comprehensive response — Jose Antonio Meade Kuribrena