1. “Education should not be a privilege.”
2. “We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.”
3. “And then many things became very clear—we learned perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.”
4. “I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.”
5. “Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am, only one of a different sort—one who risks his skin to prove his truths.”
6. “Everyday, people straighten up the hair. Why not the heart?”
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7. “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.”
8. “Let the world change you and you can change the world.”
9. “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.”
10. “Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.”
11. “The first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated.”
12. “There is no other definition of socialism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.”
13. “I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.”
14. “Be realistic, demand the impossible!”
15. “I would rather die standing up than to live life on my knees.”
16. “Silence is an argument carried out by other means.”
17. “The walls of the educational system must come down.”
18. “I will fight with all the weapons within my reach rather than let myself be nailed to a cross or whatever.”
19. “I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people.”
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20. “I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous for making a significant contribution to medical science—I wanted to help those people.”
21. “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.”
22. “I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel.”
23. “Every person has the truth in his heart.”
24. “There, we understood that our vocation—our true vocation—was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world.”
25. “Always curious, looking into everything that came before , sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly, not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice.”
26. “You are as useful as I am, but you are not aware of how useful your contribution is to the society that sacrifices you.”
27. “Man truly achieves his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity.”
28. “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.”
29. “We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.”
30. “I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources.”
31. “Work no longer entails surrendering a part of one’s being in the form of labor power sold, which no longer belongs to the individual, but becomes an expression of oneself, a contribution to the common life in which one is reflected, the fulfillment of one’s social duty.”
32. “The first commandment for every good explorer is that an expedition has two points—the point of departure and the point of arrival.”
33. “Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men—how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?”
34. “I have sworn before a portrait of the late lamented comrade Stalin that I will not rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.”
35. “It was always consoling to know that some living thing’s well-being depended on our protection.”
36. “The guerrilla band is an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the people.”
37. “Apart from whether collectivism, the ‘communist vermin,’ is a danger to decent life, the communism gnawing at his entrails was no more than a natural longing for something better, a protest against persistent hunger transformed into a love for this strange doctrine, whose essence he could never grasp but whose translation, ‘bread for the poor,’ was something which he understood and, more importantly, filled him with hope.”
38. “It is important to emphasize that guerrilla warfare is a war of the masses—a war of the people.”
39. “He interprets the desires of the great peasant mass to be owners of land, owners of their means of production, of their animals, of all that which they have long yearned to call their own, of that which constitutes their life and will also serve as their cemetery.”
40. “There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death.”
41. “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.”
42. “I don’t care if I fall as long as someone else picks up my gun and keeps on shooting.”
43. “What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two—melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.”
44. “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.”
45. “The great men who discover brilliant truths live on despite their small faults; and these faults serve only to show us they were human.”
46. “They were human beings who could make mistakes, even given the high level of consciousness achieved by these giants of human thought.”
47. “Wrapped in a police blanket, I watched the rain and smoked one black cigarette after another.”
48. “It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over.”
49. “We couldn’t give precise answers to her desperate questions and this horrified her.”
50. “Don’t Shoot! I’m Che. I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”
51. “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.”
52. “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.”
53. “Adherence to principles and adherence to the individual, combine to make the Rebel Army an indivisible fist.”
54. “You will die with a clenched fist and a tense jaw—the epitome of hatred and struggle—because you are not a symbol but a genuine member of the society to be destroyed.”
55. “Homesickness starts with food.”
56. “We executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation; it has the obligation to triumph.”
57. “The killing of persons of small importance is never advisable, since it brings on an increase of reprisals, including deaths.”
58. “When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law, peace is considered already broken.”
59. “We must take time to weep for our fallen compañeros while we sharpen our machetes.”
60. “The revolution is not an apple that falls when ripe. You have to make it fall.”
61. “The revolution is made through human beings, but individuals must forge their revolutionary spirit day by day.”
62. “When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist.”
63. “It’s a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even sadder not to have enemies.”
64. “We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press.”
65. “Newspapers are instruments of the oligarchy.”
66. “The future belongs to the people, and gradually, or in one strike, they will take power, here and in every country.”
67. “The terrible thing is, the people need to be educated, and this they cannot do before taking power, only after.”
68. “They can only learn at the cost of their own mistakes, which will be very serious and will cost many innocent lives.”
69. “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.”
70. “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution!”
71. “A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón.”
72. “Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates. Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service, and should learn to think and act as a mass.”
73. “A petty concern with mere evidence is an antiquated and bourgeois feature of the capitalist legal system. We are revolutionaries. We convict from a revolutionary passion.”
74. “The guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, in 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.”
75. “Democracy represents the dictatorship of the exploiting classes.”
76. “We won the war. The revolution begins now.”
77. “Individualism, as such as the isolated action of a person alone in a social environment, must disappear in Cuba.”
78. “Individualism tomorrow should be the proper utilization of the whole individual, to the absolute benefit of the community.”
79. “Terrorism should be considered a valuable tactic when it is used to put to death some noted leader of the oppressing forces well known for his cruelty, his efficiency in repression, or other quality that makes his elimination useful.”
80. “Individuals start to see themselves reflected in their work and to understand their full status as human beings through the object created, through the work accomplished.”
81. “Revolution is impersonal; it will take their lives, even utilizing their memory as an example or as an instrument for domesticating the youth who follow them.”
82. “It is necessary to distinguish clearly between sabotage, a revolutionary and highly effective method of warfare, and terrorism—a measure that is generally ineffective and indiscriminate in its results since it often makes victims of innocent people and destroys a large number of lives that would be valuable to the revolution.”
83. “When people hate their government, it is easy to take it down.”
84. “Distant countries, heroic deeds, and beautiful women spun around in our turbulent dream.”
85. “Conduct toward the civil population ought to be regulated by a large respect for all the rules and traditions of the people of the zone, in order to demonstrate effectively, with deeds, the moral superiority of the guerrilla fighter over the oppressing soldier.”
86. “The enormity of our endeavor escaped us in those moments, all we could see was the dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers in the flight northward.”
87. “In a real revolution, one either lives or dies.”
88. “This is a revolution, not a coup. It is either unconditional surrender or we will take down the garrison.”
89. “Its vast and jarring rhythm hammered at the fortress within me and threatened its imposing serenity.”
90. “The best form of saying is being.”
91. “A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive.”
92. “One has to grow hard but without ever losing tenderness.”
93. “The journey is a virtual space that finishes when it finishes, and there are as many means as there are different ways of finishing. That is to say, the means are endless.”
94. “There are truths so evident, so much a part of the peoples’ knowledge, that it is now useless to debate them.”
95. “If new facts bring about new concepts, the latter will never take away that portion of truth possessed by those that have come before.”
96. “No matter how complicated his circumstances, no matter how others look at him from the outside, and no matter how deep or shallow the truth dwells in his heart, once his heart is pierced with a crystal needle, the truth will gush forth like a geyser.”
97. “For me, the sea has always been a confidant—a friend absorbing all it is told and never revealing those secrets; always giving the best advice. It’s meaningful noises can be interpreted any way you choose.”