Che Guevara Quotations

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.

Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel.

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms.

Many will call me an adventurer - and that I am, only one of a different sort: one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.

I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.

The socialist countries have the moral duty of liquidating their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West.

Blind hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary.

Each spilt drop of blood, in any country under whose flag one has not been born, is an experience passed on to those who survive, to be added later to the liberation struggle of his own country. And each nation liberated is a phase won in the battle for the liberation of one's own country.

Once again I feel beneath my heels the ribs of Rocinante. Once more, I'm on the road with my shield on my arm.

The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing, have seen their patch invaded by a different kind of slave: The Portuguese. the black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink; the European comes from a tradition of working and saving which follows him to this corner of America and drives him to get ahead.

Its tall chimneys throw up black smoke, impregnating everything with soot, and the miners' faces as they traveled the streets were also imbued with that ancient melancholy of smoke, unifying everything with its grayish monotones, a perfect coupling with the gray mountain days.

...I also know - and this won't alter the course of history or your personal view of me - that you will die with a clenched fist and a tense jaw, the epitome of hatred and struggle, because you are not a symbol (some inanimate example) but a genuine member of the society to be destroyed; the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and motivates your actions. You are as useful as I am, but you are not aware of how useful your contribution is to the society that sacrifices you.

Peaceful coexistence cannot be limited to the powerful countries if we want to ensure world peace.

It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.

In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm.

Arms cannot be regarded as merchandise in our world. They should be delivered to the peoples asking for them for use against the common enemy without any charge at all, and in quantities determined by the need and their availability.

Imperialism has been defeated in many partial battles. But it remains a considerable force in the world, and we cannot expect its final defeat save through effort and sacrifice on the part of all of us.

One does not necessarily have to wait for a revolutionary situation: it can be created.

A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the The Wall!

This is the Cuzco asking you to pull on your armor and, mounted on the ample back of a powerful horse, cleave a path through the defenseless flesh of a naked Indian flock whose human wall collapses and disappears beneath the four hooves of the galloping beast.

The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese.

If it is an element of liberation for Latin America, I believe that it should have demonstrated that. Until now, I have not been aware of any such demonstration. The IMF performs an entirely different function: precisely that of ensuring that capital based outside of Latin America controls all of Latin America.

Chess is an effective means to educate and train the human intellect.

While envisaging the destruction of imperialism, it is necessary to identify its head, which is no other than the United States of America.

I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.

Socialism is young and has made errors. Many times revolutionaries lack the knowledge and intellectual courage needed to meet the task of developing the new man with methods different from the conventional ones - and the conventional methods suffer from the influences of the society, which created them.

Why does the guerrilla fighter fight? We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

It is a revolution that came to power with its own army and on the ruins of the army of oppression.

It is not a matter of wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to his death or to victory

We are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.

How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?

It is not just a simple game, it is a weapon of the revolution.

The spectacular landscape circling the fortress supplies an essential backdrop, inspiring dreamers to wander its ruins for the sake of it; North American tourists, bound down by their practical world view, are able to place those members of the disintegrating tribes they may have seen in their travels among these once-living walls, unaware of the moral distance separating them, since only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp the subtle differences.

If they attack, we shall fight to the end. If the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York, in our defense against aggression. But we haven't got them, so we shall fight with what we've got.

Guerrilla warfare is used by the side which is supported by a majority but which possesses a much smaller number of arms for use in defense against oppression.

We must not return to the practice of hiding our defects so they may not be seen. That would be neither honest nor revolutionary.

The fundamental principle is that no battle, combat, or skirmish is to be fought unless it will be won.

As long as imperialism exists it will, by definition, exert its domination over other countries. Today that domination is called neocolonialism.

Given the prevailing lack of discipline, it would have been impossible to use Congolese machine-gunners to defend the base from air attack: they did not know how to handle their weapons and did not want to learn,

I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain, from people's psychological motivations. Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the spirit. If communism isn't interested in this too, it may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a revolutionary way of life.

There are no borders in this fight to the death; we cannot be indifferent to what is happening in any part of the world.

The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this.

This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it to be. It is a glimpse of two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams.

The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination.

Democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy, with discrimination against Blacks and outrages by the Ku Klux Klan.

Direct aggression against Cuba would mean nuclear war. The Americans speak about such aggression as if they did not know or did not want to accept this fact. I have no doubt they would lose such a war.

I wanted to take part in the liberation of even a small piece of enslaved Latin America.

The monopoly capitalists - even while employing purely empirical methods - weave around art a complicated web which converts it into a willing tool. The superstructure of society ordains the type of art in which the artist has to be educated. Rebels are subdued by its machinery and only rare talents may create their own work. The rest become shameless hacks or are crushed.

Perhaps one day tired of circling the world I'll return to Argentina and settle in the Andean lakes if not indefinitely then at least for a pause while I shift from one understanding of the world to another.

There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us.

And yet every so often, the heart of America, shuddering with indignation, sends a nervous spasm through the gentle back of the Andes, and tumultuous shock waves assault the surface of the land. Three times the cuppola of proud Santo Domingo has collapsed from on high to the rhythm of broken bones and its worn walls have opened and fallen too. But the foundations they rest on are unmoved, the great blocks of the Temple of the Sun exhibit their gray stone indifferently; however colossal the disaster befalling its oppressor, not one of its huge rocks shifts from its place.

The guerrilla band is not to be considered inferior to the army against which it fights simply because it is inferior in fire power.

The negro has maintained his racial purity by his well known habit of avoiding baths

How can it be "mutually beneficial" to sell at world market prices the raw materials that cost the underdeveloped countries immeasurable sweat and suffering.

Each time a country is freed, we say, it is a defeat for the world imperialist system, but we must agree that real liberation or breaking away from the imperialist system is not achieved by the mere act of proclaiming independence or winning an armed victory in a revolution. Freedom is achieved when imperialist economic domination over a people is brought to an end.

You know, comrade Pachman, I don't enjoy being a Minister, I would rather play chess like you, or make a revolution in Venezuela.

Everyday you have to fight so that love for humanity can be transformed into concrete deeds, into acts that set an example, that mobilize.

The word that most perfectly describes the city of Cuzco is evocative. Intangible dust of another era settles on its streets, rising like the disturbed sediment of a muddy lake when you touch its bottom.

I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.

The inflow of capital from the developed countries is the prerequisite for the establishment of economic dependence. This inflow takes various forms: loans granted on onerous terms; investments that place a given country in the power of the investors; almost total technological subordination of the dependent country to the developed country; control of a country's foreign trade by the big international monopolies; and in extreme cases, the use of force as an economic weapon in support of the other forms of exploitation.

The stars drew light across the night sky in that little mountain village, and the silence and the cold made the darkness vanish away. It was - I don't know how to explain it - as if everything solid melted away into the ether, eliminating all individualtiy and absorbing us, rigid, into the immense darkness. Not a single cloud to lend perspective to the space blocked any portion of the starry sky.

The myth of the self-made man, has to be profoundly hypocritical: it is the self-serving demonstration that a lie is the truth

Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.

I will fight with all the weapons within my reach rather than let myself be nailed to a cross or whatever.

It is an illusion to think that the matter cannot be resolved through words.

We must strive everyday so that love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.

I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin. I read him when it was very bad to read him. That was another time. And because I’m not very bright, and a hard-headed person, I keep on reading him. Especially in this new period, now that it is worse to read him. Then, as well as now, I still find a Seri of things that are very good.

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

The interests of the IMF represent the big international interests that today seem to be established and concentrated in Wall Street.

Man truly achieves his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity.

Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates. Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service. The very spirit of rebellion is reprehensible.

When forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law, peace is considered already broken.

The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!

We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it, to his home, to his centers of entertainment: a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be, make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move. Then his moral fiber shall begin to decline, but we shall notice how the signs of decadence begin to disappear.

The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind! Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination! If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba) we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City!

Wrapped in a police blanket, I watched the rain and smoked one black cigarette after another...

One has to grow hard but without ever losing tenderness.

The question is one of fighting the causes and not just being satisfied with getting rid of the effects.

I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people.

The revolution is made through human beings, but individuals must forge their revolutionary spirit day by day

The desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals serves no purpose if one works alone.

My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood… Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands! With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!

Revolution cleanses men, improving them as the experimental farmer corrects the defects of his plants.

Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.

Mexicans are a band of illiterate Indians.

I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel...

A smoke in times of rest is a great companion to the solitary soldier.

There is no other definition of socialism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.

Real revolutionaries adorn themselves on the inside, not on the surface.

...because it is the very nature of Imperialism to turn humans into beasts.

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.

Americans are given the sole option of electing their jailer for four years and sometimes do him the honour of re-electing him.

Justice remains the tool of a few powerful interests; legal interpretations will continue to be made to suit the convenience of the oppressor powers.

We must do away with all newspapers. A revolution cannot be accomplished with freedom of the press.

Our youth must always be free, discussing and exchanging ideas concerned with what is happening throughout the entire world.

Words without deeds are worthless.

The university should color itself black and color itself mulatto—not just as regards students but also professors Today the people stand at the door of the university, and it is the university that must be flexible. It must color itself black, mulatto, worker, peasant, or else be left without doors. And then the people will tear it apart and paint it with the colors they see fit.