I can't spend my whole day talking to people.

I was a minister in the Frente Popular (Popular Front) government, one of the three in Chile during the Pedro Aguirre Cerda years, and I was as much a Socialist then as I am today.

Chile is a country that sells cheap and buys expensive, because we have to pay for manufactured goods from countries at much higher levels of development.

I have experience and I am employing it in the service of a Chilean road for Chile's problems. We always take advantage of experience wherever it comes from, but adapting it to our reality. I am putting it to use in a Chilean way, for the problems of Chile. We are not anyone's mental colonists.

I believe that every president wants to give everyone work but they can't; they want everyone to eat but they can't make it happen. The same happens with education. So we have to ask ourselves, "Why can't we do anything?"

It's much harder to bring about socialism through legal means, because there are so many possibilities for opposition.

I still believe in what I believed in for 20 years as a Socialist in Parliament, and being a Socialist is not the same as being a utopian.