Francisco Villa Quotes

There’s a delay taking off from San Francisco—caused, I’m guessing, by an overburdened airport, but no one will tell us for sure. At times like this, sitting stalled on the tarmac, it’s easy to think apocalyptically—airports at the bursting point, highways clogged with SUVs helmed by citizens in meltdown, smog alerts and gridlocked emergency rooms, corridors lined with the bleeding. When you’re in California this kind of vision explodes into grandiosity, and you imagine the earth ripping apart, spilling all this overconsumption, all the cell phones and seaside villas and hopeful young starlets noisily into the sea. It almost feels like a blessing.

Great cities invite you to love them in extreme close-up, to love every inch of them. And the more eccentric, convoluted, broken, and uneven they are, the more there is to love. The tenements on the Lower East Side in New York City, the decaying wooden houses above the waterfront in Istanbul, the fading rose-colored buildings in the magical little grid south of the Spanish Steps in Rome, the bombed-out villas near the Vucciria in Palermo—it is precisely the irregularity of these places that allows your heart to get a grip on them, like a climber finding a tiny hold that will not give way. Shimmering Venice has the most beautiful inches of any city in the world. San Francisco cannot compete, because it does not have streets made of water. But it has the next best thing: It has dirt trails. They make this city a place where mystery is measured in soft footsteps, and magic in clouds of dust.

Do you really think that by simply destroying what they hold most precious you'll make peace? No, it'll be the opposite, Don Francisco: you will simply cause more war. When - or if - you get rid of Manco, you'll have to deal with Villa Oma, the Sage turned warrior, and then with Illac Topa. And when they fall, others will rise behind them. And when, in turn, you're finished with them, you'll have to face your own men, you'll have to remain forever on your guard, unable to trust anybody at all. Don't you see that by behaving like this you're leaving everybody, Spaniards and Indians alike, with a legacy of war, one that they'll never give up?

His book For Whom the Bell Tolls was an instant success in the summer of 1940, and afforded him the means to live in style at his villa outside of Havana with his new wife Mary Welsh, whom he married in 1946. It was during this period that he started getting headaches and gaining weight, frequently becoming depressed. Being able to shake off his problems, he wrote a series of books on the Land, Air and Sea, and later wrote The Old Man and the Sea for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1954. Hemingway on a trip to Africa where he barely survived two successive airplane crashes. Returning to Cuba, Ernest worked reshaping the recovered work and wrote his memoir, A Moveable Feast. He also finished True at First Light and The Garden of Eden. Being security conscious, he stored his works in a safe deposit box at a bank in Havana. His home Finca Vigía had become a hub for friends and even visiting tourists. It was reliably disclosed to me that he frequently enjoyed swinger’s parties and orgies at his Cuban home. In Spain after divorcing Frank Sinatra Hemingway introduced Ava Gardner to many of the bullfighters he knew and in a free for all, she seduced many of hotter ones. After Ava Gardner’s affair with the famous Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín crashed, she came to Cuba and stayed at Finca Vigía, where she had what was termed to be a poignant relationship with Ernest. Ava Gardner swam nude in the pool, located down the slope from the Hemingway house, after which he told his staff that the water was not to be emptied. An intimate friendship grew between Hemingway’s forth and second wife, Mary and Pauline. Pauline often came to Finca Vigia, in the early 1950s, and likewise Mary made the crossing of the Florida Straits, back to Key West several times. The ex-wife and the current wife enjoyed gossiping about their prior husbands and lovers and had choice words regarding Ernest. In 1959, Hemingway was in Cuba during the revolution, and was delighted that Batista, who owned the nearby property, that later became the location of the dismal Pan Americana Housing Development, was overthrown. He shared the love of fishing with Fidel Castro and remained on good terms with him. Reading the tea leaves, he decided to leave Cuba after hearing that Fidel wanted to nationalize the properties owned by Americans and other foreign nationals. In the summer of 1960, while working on a manuscript for Life magazine, Hemingway developed dementia becoming disorganized and confused. His eyesight had been failing and he became despondent and depressed. On July 25, 1960, he and his wife Mary left Cuba for the last time. He never retrieved his books or the manuscripts that he left in the bank vault. Following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban government took ownership of his home and the works he left behind, including an estimated 5,000 books from his personal library. After years of neglect, his home, which was designed by the Spanish architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer in 1886, has now been largely restored as the Hemingway Museum. The museum, overlooking San Francisco de Paula, as well as the Straits of Florida in the distance, houses much of his work as well as his boat housed near his pool.

He apologized for having agreed to change the name of the orphanage from its original, Villa Pacelli, to Villa Francisco Javier Nuño. He explained that honoring the diocese’s first archbishop —a true hero of the Catholic Faith, who survived the bloody, Freemason, anti-Catholic persecution in Mexico, whose own father was executed by federal soldiers, hung from a tree for assisting at his son’s first Mass— meant so very much to the good men and women of Los Altos de Jalisco. He also explained that the humble archbishop, now gone to God, had meant a great deal to him as well.

The following story is a little different from the usual stories concerning gold…. In 1599, Don Francisco Manzo de Contreras was sent to Cuba as King Phillip II’s Chief Justice, with a directive to stop the smuggling of gold and other valuables. He settled in the town of Remedios in Villa Clara Province, near the northern coast seaport town of Caibarién, and over time, he became very wealthy doing exactly what he had been sent to stop! He filled his chests with gold bullion, but the heavy, bulky gold is not something that can easily be taken with you! In 1776, his heirs were three Catholic nuns, who had stashed six chests of gold into the walls of the Santa Clara Convent. Being afraid of pirates, they commissioned their nephew Joseph Manzo de Contreras to take the gold across the Atlantic to be deposited in the Bank of England in London. Being an obedient nephew, according to him, he took the gold to England and followed his aunts’ instructions to the letter. Many years later, the half-forgotten fortune was handed down to Angel Contreras, who claimed that his great-grandfather, Joseph Manzo, once had a receipt for it. The receipt was handed down through the family and when his uncle took possession of this valuable paper, he hid it, attempting to protect the family treasure. Ultimately, he was murdered when he refused to tell the thieves where it was. Unfortunately, the receipt is now lost, and although the family has searched high and low for it, it has never been found. Angel lived in Majagua, Cuba, where his family worked at a candy factory. He claimed they looked everywhere for it, but the receipt was definitely gone! With almost six decades of communistic control, the family decided to lay low and do nothing more to find it. They feared that the State would take whatever inheritance was rightfully theirs, and they probably would be right. Some of the Manzo family have since left Cuba and now live in Florida. They staged protests at the British Consulate in Miami, accusing the Queen of having reached a deal with the Cuban government. They stated that what should have been their money, was sent to Fidel Castro. During these demonstrations, nine members of the family were arrested for causing disturbances but not much else came of their claim. The Bank of England stated that the story of lost gold is just a myth, and that they have no record of it. Although this is the sad ending to the story for now, the family is continuing with their claim. However without a receipt, it seems unlikely that they have much of a case! "They put him in a madhouse," Angel said, "and then they killed him. All for greed... they wanted the money." Angel Contreras, referring to what had happened to his uncle….

Bergoglio, como sacerdote, también conocía la praxis: acoger a pecadores, prostitutas, divorciados, mujeres que habían abortado, que se hubieran confesado, para integrarlos a la vida de la Iglesia. En las villas porteñas, el matrimonio canónico representaba solo el 20% de las parejas. En Italia perdía adeptos y se pronosticaba su final para las próximas décadas.

La diferencia entre el "normal" y el "loco" es de grado, no de forma.

¿Qué sabe Francisco Villa de revoluciones cuando cruzan el rancho de las Flores hacia las 12 de la noche del día 8 de marzo? Sabe lo que aprendió en seis meses de revuelta maderista y en tres meses de campaña militar contra los colorados, pero eso es acerca de la guerra; ahora sabe también, y esto es más importante, lo que aprendió en años de bandolerismo y en seis largos meses de cárcel, donde todo el que ha leído algo sobre la historia de las revoluciones entiende que se aprende mucho. Sabe que ya llegó la hora de los pobres, que ahora la revuelta tiene enfrente claramente, sin estorbos, a los grandes hacendados y a los militares. Ahora no estará Madero para despojar de contenido social el alzamiento, ni Villa sentirá el yugo de estar encuadrado en el ejército regular. Sabe en negativo: lo que no se hizo, lo que quedó pendiente, el trágico destino de las conciliaciones con el enemigo. Sabe eso y sabe muchas cosas más que aún no sabe que sabe, pero que irán surgiendo lentamente en los próximos meses.

Madero, que finalmente regresó al país el 14 de febrero de 1911—acosado por las autoridades norteamericanas al considerar que había violado las leyes de neutralidad—, reanimó el espíritu de los combatientes, se puso al frente del Ejército Libertador y estableció su cuartel general en Bustillos, Chihuahua, el 29 de marzo; en seguida se le unieron los contingentes de Pascual Orozco y de Francisco Villa que sitiaron Ciudad Juárez el 15 de abril.

Consecuentemente, los exiliados republicanos y refugiados que huían de la Guerra Civil española y de la nueva dictadura del Generalísimo Francisco Franco tuvieron que enfrentarse a todo tipo de obstáculos en sus intentos por entrar en el país del Plata. Las autoridades temían que estas personas fueran portadoras de un “virus” izquierdista o anarquista. Lo mismo regía para los judíos, frecuentemente considerados “bolcheviques”.

Quien dice que la religión es el opio del pueblo, un tranquilizador relato para alienar las conciencias, haría bien en ir un día a las villas: vería que, gracias a la fe y a esa dedicación pastoral y cívica, han mejorado de manera increíble, pese a las enormes dificultades.

Power also uses calendars to neutralize movements that attack or have attacked its essence, its existence, or its normality. That's what commemorative dates are for. With them it narrows, limits, defines, and stops. With each day of the calendar that Above admits into its timeline, a takeover of history occurs. With these days, movements are stopped, they are terminated in all senses. There will be nothing above, in that calendarization of history, to account for the processes and movements that are reduced to one day. And so those dates are turned into statues. In Mexico, September 16 and November 20 have been mummified since the beginning of the long PRI era. Each year, the clique of criminals on duty - that is, the government - goes to monuments and parades only to ensure that Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos, Vincente Guerrero, Francisco Villa, and Emiliano Zapata remain dead.