António de Oliveira Salazar

António de Oliveira Salazar GCSE, GCIC, GCTE, GColIH (28 April 1889 – 27 July 1970) was a Portuguese politician and economist who served as Prime Minister of Portugal for 36 years, from 1932 to 1968. Salazar founded and led the Estado Novo ("New State"), the corporatist authoritarian government that ruled Portugal until the 1974 Carnation Revolution.

António de Oliveira Salazar

Quotes

• God, Homeland, Family.
  • Slogan of the Salazar regime, Times, Narrativase fiction: The Invention of Si - Page 176; of Elizeu Clementino de Souza; EDIPUCRS Publisher, ISBN 857430591X, 9788574305912

• Do not discuss God and virtue. Do not discuss the homeland and its history. Do not discuss the authority and prestige. Do not discuss the family and its moral. Not discuss the glory of work and their duty.
  • Quoted in Salazar: Biographical Study - page 368; of Franco Nogueira - Published by Atlantis Publishing, 1977

• In politics, what appears is.
  • Quoted in Salazar seen the Brazilian anthology of texts of Brazilian and Portuguese authors: anthology of texts of Brazilian and Portuguese authors of Armando Pinto - Published by Editor-Felman Rego, 1962 - 186 pages, Page 83

• I know what I want, and where to go.
  • Quoted in Salazar: biographical study - page 339; of Franco Nogueira - Published by Atlantis Publishing, 1977

• Half a dozen slaps the time.
  • Quoted in The fascist Salazar: Salazar and national-syndicalism: the story of a conflict, 1932-1935 - page 90, of John Medina - Published by Livraria Bertrand, 1978 - 249 pages

• To Angola, quickly and with strength!
  • On April 13, 1961, quoted in Salazar: biographical study - page 154; of Franco Nogueira - Published by Atlantis Publishing, 1977

• Proudly alone!
  • Quoted in Salazar: biographical study - Page 8; of Franco Nogueira - Published by Atlantis Publishing, 1977

• Do not discuss God and his reason, does not discuss the motherland and the nation.
  • Quoted in From myth to romance: a reading of the Gospel according Saramago - Page 76, of Conception Flores - Published by Publisher of UFRN, 2000 - 239 pages

• All for the nation, nothing against the nation.
  • Quoted in Salazar: biographical study - page 122; of Franco Nogueira - Published by Atlantis Publishing, 1977

• I have the grace of providence to be poor.
  • Quoted in Salazar and his time - Page 98; of César de Oliveira - The Official Publisher, 1991 ISBN 9726920876, 9789726920878 - 237 pages

• Who is not patriotic can not be considered Portuguese.
  • Quoted in Political ideology of the state Salazar - Page 22, by Jorge Campinos - Published by Portugalia Editora, 1975 - 65 pages

• The United Nations is useless...and also harmful. It is a land that flowers demagoguery with a bunch of newborn countries, devoid of any tradition.
  • Quoted in Memories of an unfinished war: Canada, the United States and the decolonization process in Angola, page 153; By Manuel Francisco Gomes; Collaborator Alberto João Jardim; Published by Edições Colibri, 2006, ISBN 9727725945, 9789727725946, 241 pages

• Teach your children to work, teach your daughters modesty, teach all the virtue of economy. And if not make them saints, at least make them Christians.
  • Quoted in Salazar: biographical study - page 285; of Franco Nogueira - Published by Atlantis Publishing, 1977

• State is the nation socially organized.
  • Speeches, Volume 4 - Page 181; of António de Oliveira Salazar - Published by Coimbra Editora, 1935 - 391 pages

• The discussions have revealed the mistake, but not explained the problem, since even if you know what you will understand it for democracy.
  • Speeches, Volume 4 - Page 250; of António de Oliveira Salazar - Published by Coimbra Editora, 1935 - 391 pages

• Definitely, decisively, the Nation, for us...and even for them.
  • Speeches, Volume 4 - Page 278; of António de Oliveira Salazar - Published by Coimbra Editora, 1935 - 391 pages

• The day I leave the power, inside my pockets will only be dust.
  • Quoted in Salazar: biographical study - page 383; of Franco Nogueira - Published by Atlantis Publishing, 1977

• Portugal was born in the shadow of the Catholic Church and religion, from the beginning it was the formative element of the soul of the nation and the dominant trait of character of the Portuguese people.
  • Salazar: speeches, notes, reports, theses, articles and interviews, 1909-1955: Anthology - Page 212; of António de Oliveira Salazar - Published by Editorial Vanguarda, 1955 - 361 pages

• Those who can, must obey.
  • Cited in My memories: things of times gone, Volume 3 - Page 13; of Cunha Leal - Published by C. Leal, 1966 Leal, 1966

• No one has to thank me for accepting the burden, because it is so big sacrifice for me to please or I would not do for kindness to anyone. I do this to for my country, as a duty of conscience, coldly, calmly completed.
  • In the speech over as Finance Minister, Speeches, Volume 1 - Page 3; of António de Oliveira Salazar, Oliveira Salazar - Published by Coimbra Editora, 1945

Quotes about Salazar

• Salazar's essential principles aim at the restoration of a code of justice and morality in the State based on Christianity and transcending the rights of the State. In short, the constant subordination of private interests to the interests of the nation as a whole is for him no platitude, but a living maxim.
  • Jacques Bainville, Dictators (1937), p. 236

• M. Salazar and his colleagues have virtually the solid backing of their fellow-countrymen behind them. The two opposing minorities are, on the Right, some of the younger university people who would like a government that would think more of national prestige and who criticize the existing régime for the modesty of its pretensions. On the Left, the Freemasons and the anti-clericals have not laid down their arms. But against the triumphant success, material and moral, of Oliveira Salazar's rule, the opposition makes but a feeble and ineffective display. It is a dictatorship that has secured its hold on the country without recourse to force, by no other means than the straightforward honesty of its methods, and by the prosperity, the real prosperity and activity which it succeeded in imparting to Portugal at the very time when all the other nations of the world were complaining of the severity of the crisis. It was the most upright, the wisest and the most moderate in Europe, and, at the same time, one of the strongest and one of the most persevering in pursuing the practical application of its principles.
  • Jacques Bainville, Dictators (1937), pp. 238-239

• Obviously, I'll dismiss him.
  • Humberto Delgado, opposition presidential candidate

• After a bitter three-year civil war initiated in 1936 by a group of army officers and supported by the parties of the National Front, General Francisco Franco established himself as dictator, the beneficiary not only of German and Italian intervention but also of the debilitating 'civil war within the civil war' between the various factions of the Left. The transition in Portugal was similar, though smoother. There, the army seized power in 1926; six years later the finance minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar became premier, promulgating an authoritarian constitution which established him as dictator the following year.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 230

• The most complete statesman, the one most worthy of respect, that I have known is Salazar. I regard him as an extraordinary personality for his intelligence, his political sense and his humility. His only defect is probably his modesty.
  • Francisco Franco, Le Figaro

• [Salazar] didn't look like a regular dictator. Rather, he appeared a modest, quiet, and highly intelligent gentleman and scholar […] literally dragged from a professorial chair of political economy in the venerable University of Coimbra a dozen years previously in order to straighten out Portugal's finances.
  • Carlton Hayes, Wartime Mission in Spain, 1942–1945 (1945), p. 36

• Though he never took Holy Orders he continued to live the solitary, ascetic life of a priest – never marrying, and devoting all his time, first to his academic career as an economist at Coimbra University, and later to running the government. He was cold, intellectual, and dedicated – a man of painful reserve: an almost Manichean fastidiousness, implying perhaps a distaste for sex, and always a total involvement with his job.
  • Paul H. Lewis (August 1978)

• Conservative or rightist extremist movements have arisen at different periods in modern history, ranging from the Horthyites in Hungary, the Christian Social Party of Dollfuss in Austria, Der Stahlhelm and other nationalists in pre-Hitler Germany, and Salazar in Portugal, to the pre-1966 Gaullist movements and the monarchists in contemporary France and Italy. The right extremists are conservative, not revolutionary. They seek to change political institutions in order to preserve or restore cultural and economic ones, while extremists of the centre and left seek to use political means for cultural and social revolution. The ideal of the right extremist is not a totalitarian ruler, but a monarch, or a traditionalist who acts like one. Many such movements in Spain, Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Italy have been explicitly monarchist. The supporters of these movements differ from those of the centrists, tending to be wealthier, and more religious, which is more important in terms of a potential for mass support.
  • Seymour Martin Lipset, "Social Stratification and 'Right-Wing Extremism,'" in British Journal of Sociology (1959:10), pp. 346–382

• Fascism is a deformity of capitalism. It heightens the imperialist tendency towards domination which is inherent in capitalism, and it safeguards the principle of private property. At the same time, fascism immeasurably strengthens the institutional racism already bred by capitalism, whether it be against Jews (as in Hitler’s case) or against African peoples (as in the ideology of Portugal’s Salazar and the leaders of South Africa). Fascism reverses the political gains of the bourgeois democratic system such as free elections, equality before the law, parliaments; and it also extolls authoritarianism and the reactionary union of the church with the state. In Portugal and Spain, it was the Catholic church—in South Africa, it was the Dutch Reformed church.
  • Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 196

• Salazar was, undoubtedly, one of the most remarkable men in the history of Portugal and possessed a quality that remarkable men do not always have: the right intention.
  • António José Saraiva, Expresso (22 April 1989)

• Salazar was never a soldier, but a prestigious professor of economics and public finance at the University of Coimbra. In 1928, at the age of thirty-nine, he first entered the Portuguese government as finance minister (and, in fact, was the one who, in 1929, authorized our life insurance company to operate in Portugal). The military junta had desperately turned to Salazar with the challenge of putting the public accounts in order, which he fully achieved. This success gave him immense political prestige, to the point that he became prime minister (and acquired absolute power) in 1933. Thus, in contrast to Franco, Salazar came to power by peaceful means, at a younger age (though he was three years older than Franco), and with a well-earned reputation as an academic and a manager.
  • Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die, Jesús Huerta de Soto, Mises Institute, 24 July 2021

• He always led a very simple and austere life and resisted honors, monuments, distinctions, and special treatment, even in his own home parish (Vimieiro), where he had a small vineyard and liked to withdraw to tend it on holidays. Salazar possessed great personal charm, he knew how to listen, and his capacity for work and attention to detail were admirable.
  • Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die, Jesús Huerta de Soto, Mises Institute, 24 July 2021

• Portugal, under the leadership of Salazar, became an island of peace and liberty in Europe during the dark years of World War II and its aftermath.
  • Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die, Jesús Huerta de Soto, Mises Institute, 24 July 2021