All Quotes

"Che was not only a heroic fighter, but a revolutionary thinker, with a political and moral project and a system of ideas and values for which he fought and gave his life. The philosophy which gave his political and ideological choices their coherence, colour, and taste was a deep revolutionary humanism. For Che, the true Communist, the true revolutionary was one who felt that the great problems of all humanity were his or her personal problems, one who was capable of feeling anguish whenever someone was assassinated, no matter where it was in the world, and of feeling exultation whenever a new banner of liberty was raised somewhere else."

"The first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels."

"We also honour the great Che Guevara, whose revolutionary exploits, including on our own continent, were too powerful for any prison censors to hide from us. The life of Che is an inspiration to all human beings who cherish freedom. We will always honour his memory."

"On his trips, he would receive gifts from his hosts, some of them very expensive. He would get presents for me as well, and he would give them away if he considered them too ostentatious. I was given a color TV only to see Che pass it on to a factory worker. And back then, it was sort of an unimaginable item. Once, after a trip to Algeria, he received a barrel of an excellent wine. When he arrived home, he told me to give it to the army barracks near our home. I would not always unconditionally obey his mandates. Knowing that wine was one of the few treats he allowed himself, I kept five liters."

"By the 1980s that sense of identity and chicanismo, that militant clarity, was hard to find. "Young people don't want to be called Chicano today," more than one professor of Chicano Studies commented to me. "It isn't really that they don't want to be called Chicano, it's more that the term has no special meaning to them, they don't know about the movement," said a former Chicana activist. At many schools, Chicanos and Chicanas were more likely to be taking courses in business administration than Chicano Studies. Ah, some of us sighed, where is Che Guevara now that we really need him?"

"At times our Chicano leftism meant little more than picking-up-the-gun, minimal thought was given to any deeper politics than having a Che Guevara poster on the wall (forgetting that Che himself would have demanded more)."

"I worked with Che in the military regiment at La Cabaña, putting order into the revolution; he personally asked me to take command of the new revolutionary police ... there was a lot of resentment against us at the beginning. People still loyal to the old regime would have done anything against us and the new, free, Cuba. Not many people wanted to stain their hands with such a job. But I did, and Che even more. Some call him "the butcher of La Cabaña" because of all the executions he had to carry out, but he did it honourably. He was a great man - so humble, so free, with such conviction. It was such a pleasure and an honour to be around him. But we were all convinced of what we were fighting for. We fought for our people to be fully happy. And we stayed alive to keep an eye on that marvellous victory."

"To his critics, Guevara was a trigger-happy megalomaniac whose bloody example led thousands to their deaths in futile uprisings that only hardened military repression from Guatemala to Chile."

"Che did not wander about in the mantle of Merlin, teaching humankind the wonder of everyday peace and harmony. Instead, he used his critical faculties to uncover and expose the mechanisms of oppression used by the global ruling class to keep the poor from taking up arms against their oppressors."

"Most people today think of Che Guevara as a revolutionary who fought against capitalism, authoritarianism and US imperialism. Less well known is that Guevara was central to the creation of Cuba’s economic policy in the early 1960s; policies that remain largely unchanged. He ran the land reform programme, was President of the National Bank of Cuba, Minister of Industry, member of the National Directorate for the economy, member of the Council of Ministers, and chief negotiator with the Soviet bloc. Guevara would steer Castro and Cuba towards a Marxist economy. He led the collectivisation and nationalisation of agriculture; nationalised virtually all industrial and commercial activity; introduced central planning; established price controls and rationing; replaced the currency and seized most savings; set the wage levels of all jobs; set industrial policy and investment; and controlled all foreign exchange and bartered with Russia, China and other communist countries."

"For my generation and for the generations that came after, Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara preside over an irreversible constellation of heroes and, for that reason, have become integrated into the most beautiful popular imagination on the planet."

"He was just like a Christ, with his strong eyes, his beard, his long hair. He is very miraculous."

"Why do we say Che is alive? Because of his grandeur, his transcendence. For us, Che is here, very much alive, in everything we say."

"Most people don't know the real Che Guevara — the Che Guevara who wrote that he was thirsty for blood, the Che who assassinated thousands of people without any regard for any real legal process."

"The myth of the holy Che must finally be destroyed."

"We feel sick about this grand show that goes on every year on the anniversary of his death. Rather than honour a man who came to invade the country, we should honour the armed forces, the soldiers who defended the country."

"You know how much I admire Che Guevara. In fact, I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age: as a fighter and as a man, as a theoretician who was able to further the cause of revolution by drawing his theories from his personal experience in battle."

"He was demanding of everyone and practiced being a personal example. Once, Guevara and other ministry officials were served steaks during a severe food shortage. Steaks are a treasured meal for Argentines, but Guevara became incensed and ordered it all removed. "What is this? No one is touching this meat. Take it away.""

"Che Guevara taught us we could dare to have confidence in ourselves, confidence in our abilities. He instilled in us the conviction that struggle is our only recourse. He, was a citizen of the free world that together we are in the process of building. That is why we say that Che Guevara is also African and Burkinabè."

"Che T-shirts are among the first things you'll see after landing at the Havana airport. But at least the Cubans know whom they're glorifying. In the United States, Che's life story and ambitions seem beside the point, or maybe they've just been reduced to caricature. The guy's face is shorthand for "I'm against the status quo." He's politics' answer to James Dean, a rebel with a very specific cause."

"In the late 1960s, if a popularity poll had been taken among the protesters, Lev Trotski, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara would probably have headed the list. They were disgusted with Soviet leaders from Stalin to Brezhnev and agreed that American Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, who had reinforced the USA’s military intervention in the conflict in Vietnam, were war criminals. The esteem for Che Guevara was enhanced by his good looks. The fact that Guevara died on campaign in Bolivia even though he could have had a comfortable career in Cuba was also counted unto him for righteousness. A similar reaction was evoked by Ho Chi Minh. Like Guevara, he was taking on the might of ‘American imperialism’. Data on Ho’s repressive regime in Hanoi were limited and would anyway have been disbelieved by his admirers if they had learned about them. The chant went up outside American embassies and on peace marches: ‘Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!’"

"Che lives!" is the slogan for a generation of restless students and budding revolutionaries the world over. The Black Panthers, who occasionally style themselves 'Che-type,' have adopted his black beret. Arab guerrillas sometimes name combat operations in his honor. Posters of Che adorn dorm walls from Berkeley to Berlin, and his books have become basic-training manuals for the New Left. Writers from Graham Greene to Susan Sontag have extolled him. West German Playwright Peter Weiss has even compared him to "a Christ taken down from the Cross."

"Che did not view economic development as an end in itself. Development of a society has meaning only if it serves to transform men and women, enhance their creative capacities, and draw them beyond self-centeredness. The transition to the kingdom of freedom is a voyage from 'me' to 'us'. And socialism cannot carry out this transition with what Che called 'the dull instruments left to us by capitalism'. We cannot advance toward communism if life under socialism is organized like a competition among wolves, as in the previous society."

"Che Guevara is an incredible individual. He had so much, but sacrificed it all for the benefit of other people."

"He taught me to think — he taught me the most beautiful thing which is to be human."

"Guevara remains a national hero in Cuba where he is remembered for promoting unpaid voluntary work by working shirtless on building sites or hauling sacks of sugar. To this day, he appears on a Cuban banknote cutting sugar cane with a machete in the fields."

"He was a man full of hatred ... Che Guevara executed dozens and dozens of people who never once stood trial and were never declared guilty ... In his own words, he said the following: "At the smallest of doubt we must execute." And that's what he did at the Sierra Maestra and the prison of Las Cabanas."

"Guevara was a ruthless enforcer of communist rule, overseeing summary executions in the early years of the Cuban Revolution."

"Che Che He's wearing a red star Smoking his cigar And when he died The whole world lied They said he was a saint But I know he ain't."

"He had eyes that seemed to go through you. I've interviewed all sorts of famous people, from Ben Gurion to Bob Dylan, but no one has ever made an impression on me like Che did. There was something Christ-like about him. I really felt that when he was talking to me, he was telling the truth."

"Even our misfortunes are a part of our belongings"

"Les pierres du chantier ne sont en vrac qu’en apparence, s’il est, perdu dans le chantier, un homme, serait-il seul, qui pense cathédrale."

"Toute nation est égoïste. Toute nation considère son égoïsme comme sacré."

"If it is true that wars are won by believers, it is also true that peace treaties are sometimes signed by businessmen."

""Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but—" And I was struck by the graphic image: "But you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity." And suddenly that tranquil cloud-world, that world so harmless and simple that one sees below on rising out of the clouds, took on in my eyes a new quality. That peaceful world became a pitfall. I imagined the immense white pitfall spread beneath me. Below it reigned not what one might think — not the agitation of men, not the living tumult and bustle of cities, but a silence even more absolute than in the clouds, a peace even more final. This viscous whiteness became in my mind the frontier between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. Already I was beginning to realize that a spectacle has no meaning except it be seen through the glass of a culture, a civilization, a craft. Mountaineers too know the sea of clouds, yet it does not seem to them the fabulous curtain it is to me."

"I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning. The squall has ceased to be a cause of my complaint. The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars."

"Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded. These prison walls that this age of trade has built up round us, we can break down. We can still run free, call to our comrades, and marvel to hear once more, in response to our call, the impassioned chant of the human voice."

"Être homme, c'est précisément être responsable. C'est connaître la honte en face d'une misère qui ne semblait pas dépendre de soi. C'est être fier d'une victoire que les camarades ont remportée. C'est sentir, en posant sa pierre, que l'on contribue à bâtir le monde."

"Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity? It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness."

"Precisely because it is perfect the machine dissembles its own existence instead of forcing itself upon our notice. And thus, also, the realities of nature resume their pride of place. It is not with metal that the pilot is in contact. Contrary to the vulgar illusion, it is thanks to the metal, and by virtue of it, that the pilot rediscovers nature. As I have already said, the machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them. Numerous, nevertheless, are the moralists who have attacked the machine as the source of all the ills we bear, who, creating a fictitious dichotomy, have denounced the mechanical civilization as the enemy of the spiritual civilization. If what they think were really so, then indeed we should have to despair of man, for it would be futile to struggle against this new advancing chaos. The machine is certainly as irresistible in its advance as those virgin forests that encroach upon equatorial domains."

"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together. Do our dreamers hold that the invention of writing, of printing, of the sailing ship, degraded the human spirit? It seems to me that those who complain of man's progress confuse ends with means. True, that man who struggles in the unique hope of material gain will harvest nothing worth while. But how can anyone conceive that the machine is an end? It is a tool. As much a tool as is the plough. The microscope is a tool. What disservice do we do the life of the spirit when we analyze the universe through a tool created by the science of optics, or seek to bring together those who love one another and are parted in space?"

""I swear that what I went through, no animal would have gone through." This sentence, the noblest ever spoken, this sentence that defines man's place in the universe, that honors him, that re-establishes the true hierarchy, floated back into my thoughts."

"Human drama does not show itself on the surface of life. It is not played out in the visible world, but in the hearts of men. … One man in misery can disrupt the peace of a city. It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world."

"Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre, Et mon sein, où chacun s’est meurtri tour à tour, Est fait pour inspirer au poète un amour Eternel et muet ainsi que la matière.'Je trône dans l’azur comme un sphinx incompris; J’unis un cœur de neige à la blancheur des cygnes; Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes, Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris."

"No man can draw a free breath who does not share with other men a common and disinterested ideal. Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. There is no comradeship except through union in the same high effort. Even in our age of material well-being this must be so, else how should we explain the happiness we feel in sharing our last crust with others in the desert? No sociologist's textbook can prevail against this fact. Every pilot who has flown to the rescue of a comrade in distress knows that all joys are vain in comparison with this one. And this, it may be, is the reason why the world today is tumbling about our ears. It is precisely because this sort of fulfilment is promised each of us by his religion, that men are inflamed today. All of us, in words that contradict each other, express at bottom the same exalted impulse. What sets us against one another is not our aims — they all come to the same thing — but our methods, which are the fruit of our varied reasoning. Let us, then, refrain from astonishment at what men do. One man finds that his essential manhood comes alive at the sight of self-sacrifice, cooperative effort, a rigorous vision of justice, manifested in an anarchist's cellar in Barcelona. For that man there will henceforth be but one truth — the truth of the anarchists. Another, having once mounted guard over a flock of terrified little nuns kneeling in a Spanish nunnery, will thereafter know a different truth — that it is sweet to die for the Church. If, when Mermoz plunged into the Chilean Andes with victory in his heart, you had protested to him that no merchant's letter could possibly be worth risking one's life for, Mermoz would have laughed in your face. Truth is the man that was born in Mermoz when he slipped through the Andean passes."

"Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."

"Les grandes personnes ne comprennent jamais rien toutes seules, et c'est fatigant, pour les enfants, de toujours leur donner des explications."

"Ce qui embellit le désert, dit le petit prince, c'est qu'il cache un puits quelque part..."

"L'avenir, tu n'as point à le prévoir mais à le permettre."

"Ne confonds point l’amour avec le délire de la possession, lequel apporte les pires souffrances. Car au contraire de l’opinion commune, l’amour ne fait point souffrir. Mais l’instinct de propriété fait souffrir, qui est le contraire de l’amour."