Quotes & Sayings About Guatemala

More than half of Guatemalans are pureblooded Indians, descendants of the proud Maya-Quiche tribes. In their mist-shrouded villages, the Indians worship the corn god and the rain god, only vaguely concerned with the political entity known as Guatemala. — Stephen Kinzer

I've been traveling in Guatemala in the rainforest, and here all these houses are made of sticks. It seems so easy to make one. — Bjork

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

I wasn't the only orphan in Guatemala. There are many others, and it's not my grief alone, it's the grief of a whole people. — Rigoberta Menchu

Everyday, you get home from the shops with a bag of cat food and bin-liners and realise that, yet again, you failed to have cosmetic surgery, book a cheap weekend in Paris, change your name to something more glamorous, but the fifth series of The Sopranos, divorce your spouse, sell up and move to Devon, or adopt a child from Guatemala. — Lynne Truss

I wasnt privy to all of the intelligence that was coming in about Guatemala, but I did see the traffic that was coming in from Guatemala City, because it was very relevant to me, and of course I exchanged what I had with the chief of station in Guatemala City. — E. Howard Hunt

Sometimes I'd have breakfast in Guatemala and go to sleep in Mexico. — Adria Arjona

By the laws of the land, people who come looking for jobs in America are illegal. But by the laws of economics, they are following the logic and laws of economics when they leave Guatemala and go to Mexico, leave Mexico and come to the U.S., leave Africa and go to Spain and Europe looking for jobs. — Benjamin Barber

I could become very rich in Guatemala but by the low method of ratifying my title, opening a clinic, and specialising in allergies. To do that would be the most horrible betrayal of the two 'I's' struggling inside me: the socialist and the traveller. — Che Guevara

in October 2014, the United States was inundated with more than fifty thousand unaccompanied children from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. "They're fleeing from threats and violence in their home countries," noted Vox, "where things have gotten so bad that many families believe that they have no choice but to send their children on the long, dangerous journey north." Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador are among the most environmentally degraded and deforested regions in Central America. They cut their forests; we got their kids. It — Thomas L. Friedman

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

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

Jesus is ready to set us free from the heavy yoke of an oppressive way of life. Plenty of wealthy Christians are suffocating from the weight of the American dream, heavily burdened by the lifeless toil and consumption we embrace. This is the yoke from which we are being set free. And as we are liberated from the yoke of global capitalism, our sisters and brothers in Guatemala, Liberia, Iraq, and Sri Lanka will also be liberated. Our family overseas, who are making our clothes, growing our food, pumping our oil, and assembling our electronics
they too need to be liberated from the empire's yoke of slavery. Their liberation is tangled up with our own. — Shane Claiborne

You show me a tropical fruit and I'll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala. — George Carlin

This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it's the United States. Life will make a lot more sense, he said. — James Lee Burke

Well, Colonel, there is diplomacy and there is reality. Our ambassador represents diplomacy. I represent reality. And the reality is we don't want you. — Stephen Kinzer

In the sublime days before 11 September 2001, when the powerful were routinely attacking and terrorising the weak, and those dying were black or brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala, there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on 9/11, there was terrorism. — John Pilger

The evidence is now clear that the majority of people coming across the border are not from Mexico. They're coming from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. Those countries are the source of the people that are now coming in its majority. — Marco Rubio

Many instances of persecution and killing have occurred in countries with atrocious human rights records such as Sri Lanka, Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of Congo. — David Suzuki

The US has attacked countries like Grenada, Panama, Libya ... the list of victims of US terrorism is almost infinite. And the US government's participation in torture, whether in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile ... is well-documented and widely known. — Assata Shakur

Each of the bracelets I wear is from a long trip I've taken. One is from Nicaragua. One is from Nepal. One is from Guatemala. One is from Laos. They don't come off. I walk into a lot of very high-level boardrooms now, and I present to distinguished conferences, but these bracelets remind me of the places I've been and the people I've met. — Adam Braun

His training had a fatal flaw: he cared. He asked me what I wanted to eat for dinner. He knew I liked green, and if he had a choice between a blue sweater and a green one, he'd buy the green one for me even if it cost more. I like swimming, and when we traveled, he made it a point to lay our route so it would go past a lake or a river. He let me speak my mind. My opinion mattered. I was a person to him and I was important. I saw him treat others as if they were important. For all of his supposed indifference, there is a town in Oklahoma that worships him and a little village in Guatemala that put a wooden statue of him at the gates to protect them from evil spirits. He helped people, when he thought it was right. — Ilona Andrews

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

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

What the United States wanted in Guatemala - and in Iran, where the C.I.A. also deposed a government in the early 1950s - was pro-American stability. — Stephen Kinzer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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