“I can assure you that my first and foremost interest is my country. This is not a personal matter. We are not people driven by a wish to be in the government since it is for us the least attractive work, even though we are politicians.”

I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement, but we do not have to say that we are anticommunists just to fawn on foreign powers.

The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.

I am not a follower of Moscow, but its victim.

The greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.

The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

Ideas do not need weapons.

This country is heaven, in the spiritual sense of the word. And I say, we prefer to die in heaven than survive in hell.

Revolutionaries must proclaim their ideas courageously … and express their intentions so that no one is deceived.

Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet.

Nothing in the world is irreversible, not even capitalism.

I never perceived a contradiction in the political revolutionary field between the ideas I maintained and the idea of that symbol, that extraordinary figure who had been so familiar to me since I began to reason.

I have not seen the Himalayas. But I have seen Sheikh Mujib. In personality and in courage, this man is the Himalayas. I have thus had the experience of witnessing the Himalayas.

I have reached the conclusion, a bit late perhaps, that speeches should be short.

On birthdays I avoid taking hasty or impulsive measures.

A smart policy should be one that tends to receive the capitals, pays the price for that capital – which is the interest – returns the capital and in the end the factories, the industries, are left to remain in the country.

More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World.

History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?

A youth with wings are the assurance of our nation’s future. We must start to work right away and make progress so that; if one day Westerners leave their footprints on the moon, we shall place a Turkish one among those.

I’d rather be shot by a bullet than to be cut by your words. I’ll die cold on the pavement before I lie in the casket of your assurances.

In the assurance of strength there is strength; and they are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their powers.

Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

Perseverance is more than endurance. It is endurance combined with absolute assurance and certainty that what we are looking for is going to happen.

Be assured that there is no sin you have ever committed that the blood of Jesus Christ cannot cleanse.

You really just want to know that somebody loves you for you. Sometimes you feel like an ATM machine with a wig on it.