“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.

How happy it is to believe, with a steadfast assurance, that our petitions are heard even while we are making them; and how delightful to meet with a proof of it in the effectual and actual grant of them.

That just laws which uphold human rights are the necessary foundation of peace and security would be denied only by closed minds which interpret peace as the silence of all opposition and security as the assurance of their own power.

Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past.

I came then to a conviction that has never left me: that there is too much for me to attend to in this mortal life without overspeculation on the immortal, that it is not necessary to my peace of mind or to my effort to be a decent and useful person, to have a definite assurance about the affairs of the next world.

Scriptural hope is not wishful thinking. It’s rock-solid assurance!

Clothes have always had a wonderful influence on my physical well-being as well as my self-assurance.

In all thy undertakings, let a reasonable assurance animate thy endeavors if thou despairest of success, thou shalt not succeed.

You can point to these things, and you can have that assurance.