“We are not politicians. We made our revolution to get the politicians out.”

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.

Yoga does things with the human body that defy the imagination.

I was a man who was lucky enough to have discovered a political theory, a man who was caught up in the whirlpool of Cuba’s political crisis…; discovering Marxism…was like finding a map in the forest.

Today, the entire country is an immense University.

No thieves, no traitors, no interventionists! This time the revolution is for real!

One of the greatest benefits of the revolution is that even our prostitutes are college graduates.

Cuba has the cleanest and most-educated prostitutes in the world.

We have a theoretical concept of the Revolution which is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

I get no respect. The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I would be honest.

The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I would be honest.

There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as ‘caring’ and ‘sensitive’ because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money.

Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.

I rarely meet a politician that I don’t like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.

The public want honesty from their politicians. Not showy gimmicks.

Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus.

Public opinion is presumptively an input to policy formation in a democracy because politicians respond to it or at least are believed to respond [to it].