Interview with Jose Mujica, 40th President of Uruguay

"Either you're happy with very little, free of all that extra luggage, because you have happiness inside, or you don't get anywhere! I am not advocating poverty, I am advocating sobriety.......We have invented a mountain of superfluous needs. Shopping for new, discarding the old....Thats a waste of our lives! When you or I buy something you're not paying money for it, your paying with the hours of life you had to spend earning that money. The difference is that life is one thing that money can't buy. Life only gets shorter and it is pitiful to waste one's life and freedom that way.

The crisis is not environmental, it's political. Our civilization has reached a phase where we need a planetary consensus, and we are looking away from it. We are blinded by chauvinism and the thirst for domination, especially the more powerful countries. They should be setting an example. .....It is shameful.

Human nature is constructed in such a way that you end up learning much more from suffering than from a life of ease.

You can always pick yourself up from it. It's always worth starting from zero again, once or a thousand times, as long as you're still alive. That's the biggest lesson in life.

You are not defeated until you give up the fight. You give up the fight by giving up the dream. Fighting, dreaming, being down on the ground, confronting reality, that's what gives meaning to existence, to the lives we lead."

Jose Mujica

Uruguay