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

In the Third World, there are 1.3 billion poor people. In other words, one out of every three inhabitants lives in poverty.

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

A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.

Were Kennedy not a millionaire, illiterate and ignorant, then he would obviously understand that you cannot revolt against the peasants.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

I don’t think that the contradictions between capitalism and socialism can be resolved by war. This is no longer the age of the bow and arrow. It’s the nuclear age, and war can annihilate us all. The only way to achieve solutions seems to be for the different social systems to coexist.

There is talk of the failure of socialism, and where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and in Latin America?

Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality, nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty.

So these Red Sox, are they a Communist organization?

We are not only a Latin American nation, we are an Afro-American nation also.

The universities are available only to those who share my revolutionary beliefs.

Repetition is a revolutionary virtue.

I never saw a contradiction between the ideas that sustain me and the ideas of that symbol, of that extraordinary figure, Jesus Christ.

Quality of life lies in knowledge, in culture. Values are what constitute true quality of life, the supreme quality of life, even above food, shelter and clothing.

I believe that all of us ought to retire relatively young.

We are going to give a little something, a few little years more, to socialism, because socialism is defunct. It dies all by itself. The bad thing is that socialism, being a victim of its Did I say socialism?