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.

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?"

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.

People can progress only by working and producing more.

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

The Popular Unity government represented the first attempt anywhere to build a genuinely democratic transition to socialism - a socialism that, owing to its origins, might be guided not by authoritarian bureaucracy, but by democratic self-rule.

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.