Bolívar Quotes

“I am ashamed to admit it, but independence is the only thing we have won, at the cost of everything else.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“If any one man were indispensable to a state’s survival, that state should not and will not exist. . .”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“Nigger—as if the black blood rumored to course in his veins explained all his harebrained ideals about equality.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“Count Aranda, an advisor to the Spanish throne, who—long before, in the year of Bolívar’s birth—had said of the United States, “There will come a time when she is a giant, a colossus even, much to be feared in those vast regions. Then, she will forget the benefits she received from others and think only of aggrandizing herself.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“All murderers shall be punished, unless of course they kill in large numbers, to the sound of trumpets. —Voltaire”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“The art of victory is learned in failures. —Simón Bolívar”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“America is ungovernable; 2. he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea; 3. all one can do in America is leave it; 4. the country is bound to fall into unimaginable chaos, after which it will pass into the hands of an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color; 5. once we are devoured by all manner of crime and reduced to a frenzy of violence, no one—not even the Europeans—will want to subjugate us; 6. and, finally, if mankind could revert to its primitive state, it would be here in America, in her final hour. He”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“I don’t want to be like trees that put down roots in one place,” he wrote. “I’d rather be like the wind, the water, the sun—like all those things that are forever in perpetual motion.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“Outside Caracas patriots hardly fared better. The “Legions of Hell”—hordes of wild and truculent plainsmen—rode out of the barren llanos to punish anyone who dared call himself a rebel. Leading these colored troops was the fearsome José Tomás Boves. A Spanish sailor from Asturias, Boves had been arested at sea for smuggling, sent to the dungeons of Puerto Cabello, then exiled to the Venezuelan prairie, where he fell in with marauding cowboys. He was fair-haired, strong-shouldered, with an enormous head, piercing blue eyes, and a pronounced sadistic streak. Loved by his feral cohort with a passion verging on worship, he led them to unimaginable violence. As Bolívar’s aide Daniel O’Leary later wrote, “Of all the monsters produced by the revolution . . . Boves was the worst.” He was a barbarian of epic proportions, an Attila for the Americas. Recruited by Monteverde but beholden to no one, Boves raised a formidable army of black, pardo, and mestizo llaneros by promising them open plunder, rich booty, and a chance to exterminate the Creole class. The llaneros were accomplished horsemen, well trained in the art of warfare. They needed few worldly goods, rode bareback, covered their nakedness with loincloths. They consumed only meat, which they strapped to their horses’ flanks and cured by the sweat of the racing animals. They made tents from hides, slept on earth, reveled in hardship. They lived on the open prairie, which was parched by heat, impassable in the rains. Their weapon of choice was a long lance of alvarico palm, hardened to a sharp point in the campfire. They were accustomed to making rapid raids, swimming on horseback through rampant floods, the sum of their earthly possessions in leather pouches balanced on their heads or clenched between their teeth. They could ride at a gallop, like the armies of Genghis Khan, dangling from the side of a horse, so that their bodies were rendered invisible, untouchable, their killing lances straight and sure against a baffled enemy. In war, they had little to lose or gain, no allegiance to politics. They were rustlers and hated the ruling class, which to them meant the Creoles; they fought for the abolition of laws against their kind, which the Spaniards had promised; and they believed in the principles of harsh justice, in which a calculus of bloodshed prevailed.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“EVEN HERE, IN THESE FIRST glimmers of liberty, we begin to see the character of a continent. The American-born were hungry for liberties, yet unaccustomed to freedom; resourceful, yet unacquainted with self-rule; racially mixed, yet mistrustful of whatever race they were not. For three hundred years of authoritarian reign, Spain had carefully instilled these qualities. “Divide and subjugate” had been the rule. Education had been discouraged, in many cases outlawed, and so ignorance was endemic. Colonies were forbidden from communicating with each other, and so—like spokes of a wheel—they were capable only of reporting directly to a king. There was no collaborative spirit, no model for organization, no notion of hierarchy. It was why the people of Coro or Maracaibo or Guayana refused to obey their newly independent brothers in Caracas; given the choice, they preferred the crown. And even though Americans had been inclined to mix across racial lines from the beginning, Spain had worked hard to keep the races apart, feed their suspicions. Add to this a church that was thoroughly opposed to independence, and a picture emerges unlike any other in that age of revolutions. If Spanish America now found itself strong enough to rise up against Spain, it would never quite rid itself of the divisions that the Council of the Indies had carefully installed in the first place.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“El hombre, al perder su libertad —había dicho Homero, y ahora lo citaba Bolívar—, pierde la mitad de su espíritu”.”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América

“Ni Alejandro, ni Aníbal, ni siquiera Julio César habían luchado en un terreno tan amplio e inhóspito. Carlomagno habría tenido que duplicar sus victorias para igualar las de Bolívar. Napoleón, en su lucha por construir un imperio, había cubierto menos terreno que Bolívar en su campaña por conquistar la libertad[3].”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América

“No sorprende que a lo largo de los años los latinoamericanos hayan aprendido a aceptar las imperfecciones humanas de sus líderes. Bolívar se lo enseñó.”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América

“Casi de inmediato Bolívar recibió una agitada carta de Páez[66], en la que le informaba sobre el miserable estado de cosas en Venezuela. “No se imagina lo ruinosas que han resultado las intrigas en este país[67] —le decía Páez—. Morillo tenía razón al decirle que le había hecho un favor al matar a todos los abogados”. Pero según Páez, los españoles no habían matado a los suficientes. Eran los hombres de leyes, insistía, quienes estaban paralizando la república.”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América

“La mentira de que instauraría un trono, fantasma inventado por sus enemigos y extrañamente acogido por sus seguidores, había caldeado las pasiones hasta un punto febril.”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América

“En Bolívar veía al único líder que podía librar a la nación de la nauseabunda corrupción política, la insurgencia armada y la rampante ignorancia que la corroían[”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América

“Le dijo a Nariño que Colombia era un campo militar[6] y no una sociedad funcional. Mientras peleaba en solitario contra los abusos del gobierno, había visto cuan sobornables y corruptos podían ser los políticos y cuan incapaz había sido de controlarlos.”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América

“A veces parece que el camino más arduo de la guerra es el que conduce a la paz.”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América