Eduardo Galeano from 'Patas Arriba'

Does history repeat itself? Or might it be that it repeats itself only as a penance of those who are unable to listen to it? History is not mute. As much as they burn it, as much as the break it, as much as they lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. The time that was continues to beat, alive, from within the time which is, even if this time (the present) doesn't want it to, or doesn't know. The right to remember doesn't figure among the human rights consecrated by
the UN, but today more than ever it's necessary to reinvigorate it and put it in practice: not to repeat the past, but to avoid repeating it; not so that we, the living, should be ventriloquists of the dead, but so that we may be able to speak with voices not condemned to the perpetual echo of stupidity and disgrace. When it is indeed alive, memory doesn't contemplate history, it invites us to make it. More than in the museums, where the poor man gets bored, memory is in the air we breath; and she, from the air, breathes us.