O povo não tem a mínima cultura. Muitos nem sabem ler ou escrever. O povo não viaja, não se interessa por boa música ou literatura, não vai a museus. O povo não gosta de trabalho criativo, prefere empregos ignóbeis e aviltantes. Isto quando trabalha, pois há os que preferem o ócio contemplativo, embaixo de pontes. Se não fosse o povo nossa economia funcionaria como uma máquina. Todo mundo seria mais feliz sem o povo. O povo é deprimente. O povo deveria ser eliminado.
This quote is apocryphal, that is, there is no evidence this quote was actually written by Luís Fernando Verissimo.
There are a ton of short texts that are either wrongly associated or falsely attributed to Verissimo altogether, and this is one of them. There is not a single evidence of authorship of this chronicle being written by Verissimo himself, I even bought his antology, "Verissimo antológico", that united over 50 years of work and literature in a single book on Amazon - link of the e-book is here: shorturl.at/bdhEK- and not a single line of text of this chronicle or text is written there.
Whoever wrote this text, it is surely not Verissimo who wrote it
Well, this quote certainly caught me off guard. Brazilian portuguese rather than the european one. Perhaps distinguishing both would be a good idea so that the writers of the different standards aren't surprised as well. Also, this quote seems to have a mistake in the last phrase: there are two spaces between "deveria" and "ser"; and although I do not know if this is present in the original text or not it should probably be corrected.