Reply #1: The authors probably had a lot of work...

[ocpagu]

... to chose one single sentence by João Figueiredo. He's quite famous for saying unbelievable things and he probably deserved a quotation in every top 10 of this book. On the other hand, he was probably the most "open-faced" of all military junta's presidents about his true opinions. Some examples:

"I prefer the smell of my horses than the smell of the people".

"If I depended on minimum wage to survive, I would shoot myself in the head."

"The solution to the favelas is throwing an atomic bomb".

"I arrived and the baianas came to hug me. They left an unbearable smell. I arrived in the hotel, tooke 3, 5, 7 showers and couldn't get rid of that smell of "nig**r". (Baianas is the gentilic of the women from Bahia, a state in Brazil heavily populated by afro-descendents.)

More, in Portuguese:
http://pt.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_Baptista_de_Oliveira_Figueiredo