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

The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger.

If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.

Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour.

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.

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.