30 phrases by Milton Santos for those who love the study of geography

Communication is an exchange of emotion.

Brazil has never had citizens, we, the middle class, don’t want rights, we want privileges, and the poor don’t have rights. There is, therefore, no citizenship in this country, there never was!

There are only two social classes, those who do not eat and those who do not sleep for fear of the revolution of those who do not eat.

The world is formed not only by what already exists, but by what can actually exist.

The consumption that is today the great fundamentalism.

Geography is not a discipline that can seduce the modern world. It is a discipline that is intended to be synthetic.

Being black in Brazil is often the object of a skewed gaze.

Adélia, I’m going to write an easy book for anyone who isn’t a geographer to understand, for anyone from the people to understand.

Education does not have as its real object to arm the citizen for a war, that of competition with others. Its purpose, less and less sought after and less attained, is to form people capable of placing themselves correctly in the world and of influencing the improvement of human society as a whole.

The strength of alienation comes from this fragility of individuals, when they can only identify what separates them and not what unites them.

Education as a commodity reproduces and expands inequalities, without removing the ills of ignorance. Education only for sectorial production, education only professional, education only consumerist, creates, after all, uneducated people for life.

Globalization kills the notion of solidarity, returns man to the primitive condition of each man for himself and, as if we were going back to being wild animals, reduces the notions of public and private morality to almost nothing.

It is difficult to be black and it is difficult to be an intellectual in Brazil. These two things together give what they give, don’t they?

The information about what happens does not come from the interaction between people, but from what is conveyed by the media, an interested, if not self-interested, interpretation of the facts.

The environment is not even a subtotal. In reality, it is a limiting treatment of the question of the environment, the environment, let’s say.

God is the whole, he is in everything.

Man relates to a society full of space, but not to nature. Because there is no dialectic between man and something that has no purpose like nature.

Because the globalization process is not the result of chance, it is the result of extremely well-done planning.

The bad nature associated with lack of education leads to racism, prejudice and even marginality.

Neither money nor information would have the strength they have in countries like Brazil, without the State deciding to give them a strong hand.

What is transmitted to the majority of humanity is, in fact, manipulated information that, instead of clarifying, confuses.

Sometimes we think we’re going to be strong and hold on until the end, but there comes a time when you really get tired of thinking.

Because I arrive in France and I don’t know if, due to my moving origin, I become an excluded person who assumes his exclusion.

My current position is considered, by Anglo-Saxon colleagues, to be structural-existentialist. I think that structuralism, as long as it is helped by history, has a lot to contribute.

The power of geography is given by its ability to understand the reality in which we live.

The production of globalization is the product of a project.

In fact, the basis of imperialism is non-homogenization. You can have an empire that is way ahead of others from a technological, financial and commercial point of view, and that coexists with other empires. The American Empire is the first to decide alone whether to rule the world. This results from new historical conditions.