Talk:Simón Bolívar

Unsourced
Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Simón Bolívar. --Antiquary 17:51, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I swear before you; I swear on the God of my parents; I swear on them; I swear on my honor and I swear on my country that I shall not give rest to my arm nor respite to my soul until I have broken the chains that oppress us by the will of the Spanish power.


 * If Nature is against us, we shall fight Nature, and make it obey.


 * It is harder to maintain the balance of freedom than it is to endure the weight of tyranny.


 * Legislators could certainly do with a school of morals.


 * Morals and lights are our first necessities.


 * The art of victory is learned in defeat.


 * The freedom of the New World is the hope of the Universe.


 * To do something right it must be done twice. The first time instructs the second.


 * An ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction.
 * The Ignorance the people live in leads them to commit mistakes against their own happiness


 * Nations will march towards the apex of their greatness at the same pace as their education. Nations will soar if their education soars; they will regress if it regresses. Nations will fall and sink in darkness if education is corrupted or completely abandoned


 * Talent without probity is a scourge.


 * There is nothing as corrosive as praise. It sweetens the palate, but corrupts the soul.


 * The first duty of a government is to give education to the people.


 * God grants victory to perseverance.

"plow the sea" vs. "plow in the sea"?
In the "Letter near the end of his life (November 9, 1830)", Bolívar wrote, "El que sirve una revolución ara en el mar", literally, "He who serves a revolution plows in the sea." I had previously dropped the preposition, "in". I just now added it back in: It doesn't sound as smooth, but I think it's closer to what he actually wrote.

What about the other places where he apparently used that phrase? I'm not familiar with those sources, and I don't see them in the companion Spanish-language Wikiquote article on him.

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 07:12, 10 May 2021 (UTC)