Latin American Revolutionaries

"Mr. Chávez is my brother, he is a friend of the Iranian nation and the people seeking freedom around the world. He works perpetually against the dominant system. He is a worker of God and servant of the people."

"Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all, I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today - ethics, and moral...[Capitalism is] an infernal machine that produces every minute an impressive amount of poor, 26 million poor in 10 years are 2.6 million per year of new poor, this is the road, well, the road to hell."

"I don't want to die. Please don't let me die."

"Democracy is not just turning up to vote every five or four years, it’s much more than that, it’s a way of life, it’s giving power to the people."

"The stem cell debate was an introduction to a phenomenon I witnessed throughout my presidency: highly personal criticism. Partisan opponents and commentators questioned my legitimacy, my intelligence, and my sincerity. They mocked my appearance, my accent, and my religious beliefs. I was labeled a Nazi, a war criminal, and Satan himself. That last one came from a foreign leader, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez."

"I extend from here my recognition of all who voted against us, recognition of their democratic weight."

"I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet"

"El socialismo bolivariano nosotros tenemos que construirlo en el marco de la Constitución Bolivariana. [...] Nosotros no tenemos prevista la eliminación de la propiedad privada, ni la grande ni la pequeña. [...] El socialismo tenemos que construirlo, los sectores de clase media, profesionales, técnicos, nos hacen falta para construir un socialismo productivo. Nosotros necesitamos a la clase media, a los profesionales, a los técnicos, a los empresarios, a los agricultores, a la juventud, que se incorpore a un debate amplio. El socialismo del siglo XXI es democracia. Nosotros no estamos hablando de la dictadura del proletariado. No."

"Liberator of Libya, He will be remembered as a great fighter, a revolutionary and martyr. They assassinated him. It is another outrage."

"...the solutions for Latin America pass through the left, they have to transit the left, but they cannot remain within the framework of the left, they have to go beyond the left. Because we could hardly describe the Latin American armed forces as leftist. Trying to push them to the left (...) I think it would be a utopia. We could classify the Latin American armed forces, many Latin American soldiers, as nationalists, in this time of neoliberal denationalization. Well, you have to go through there too. The solution has to go through the left, through nationalism, through patriotism and achieve a great alliance of all these sectors [bold in the original] (...) The support of the military is vital to make a program of transformation in Latin America (...) Many left-wing intellectuals in Venezuela have not understood it (...) However, we have managed to shake the national soul, as Neruda said, we managed to put Bolívar on the table, with another sign , with a revolutionary sign."

"You should resign. It's the least you can do: Resign, along with those other spies and delinquents working in the State Department."

"Mr. Obama decided to attack us, Now you want to win votes by attacking Venezuela. Don’t be irresponsible. You are a clown, a clown. Leave us in peace … Go after your votes by fulfilling that which you promised your people."

"We have arrived again to Venezuela, Thank God. Thanks to my beloved country."

"Last Friday, Chavez held a press conference with foreign correspondents in which he showed pictures of the alleged leaders of the paramilitary group. “The paramilitary incursion is a historic incident with worldwide resonance which only the local private media have tried to minimize,” said the President. The President spoke out against Capitalism, and criticized the fact that after the Cold War many on the left stopped talking about Capitalism, replacing it with the word Neoliberalism. Both terms refer to “the same assassin, perverse and stinky empire”. During his presidency, Chavez himself has spoken out against Neoliberalism, while claiming to lead a revolution to build “Capitalism with a human face”. He has only recently started to criticize Capitalism directly."

"At least for the time being, I believe a serious crisis was averted in Venezuela — and Chavez was saved — by Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration could not take on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Venezuela all at once. At the moment, it had neither the military muscle nor the political support to do so. I knew, however, that such circumstances could change quickly, and that President Chavez was likely to face fierce opposition in the near future."

"I nationalize strategic companies and get criticized, but when Bush does it, it's OK. … Bush is turning socialist. How are you, comrade Bush?"

"Every factory must be a school to educate, like Che Guevara said, to produce not only briquettes, steel, and aluminum, but also, above all, the new man and woman, the new society, the socialist society."

"If any international channel comes here to take part in an operation from the imperialist against Venezuela, your reporters will be thrown out of the country, they will not be able to work here. People at CNN, listen carefully: This is just a warning."

"If the "yes" vote wins on Sunday and the Venezuelan oligarchy, playing the [U.S.] empire's game, comes with their little stories of fraud, oil shipments to the United States will be halted [on Monday]."

"We're not really confronting those peons of imperialism. Our true enemy is called the North American empire and we're going to give another knockout to Bush."

"A Third World War? With an atom bomb? He said it, with an atom bomb. There would be no more world. The world would end. Humanity would no longer exist. I think he has to be put in an asylum. He has to be put in an mental asylum."

"It doesn't smell of sulphur any more. No, it smells of something else. It smells of hope, and you have to have hope in your heart."

"La propiedad privada es aquella que pertenece a personas naturales o jurídicas y que se reconoce sobre bienes de uso y consumo y medios de producción legítimamente adquiridos."

"Fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

"Critico, aunque respeto, a mis amigos que sostienen la idea marxista leninista de que no debe haber propiedad privada, porque no la comparto."

"I'm not loved by Hillary Clinton... and I don't love her either."

"The two of them [Bush & Negroponte] are criminals. They should be tried and thrown in prison for the rest of their days. If he had any dignity, the president of the United States would quit. The U.S. president doesn't have the political or moral capacity to govern."

"No se trata de estatizar toda la economía (...) No, nuestro socialismo acepta la propiedad privada. Solo que esa propiedad privada debe estar en el marco de una constitución y leyes y de un interés social."

"Go to hell, gringos! Go home!...What does the empire want? Condoleezza said it. How are you? You’ve forgotten me, missy...Condoleezza said it clearly, it’s about creating a new geopolitical map in the Middle East...They took out Saddam Hussein and they hung him, for better or worse. It’s not up to me to judge any government, but that gentleman was the president of that country."

"If the United States was mad enough to attack Iran or aggress Venezuela again the price of a barrel of oil could reach $150 or even $200."

"Israel has gone mad. It's attacking, doing the same thing to the Palestinian and Lebanese people that they have criticised - and with reason - the Holocaust. But this is a new Holocaust."

"The Devil is right at home. The Devil, the Devil himself, is right in the house. And the Devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the Devil came here. Right here. [crosses himself] And it smells of sulphur still today. Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the Devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world."

"Let's save the human race, let's finish off the U.S. empire"

"I have found yet another friend here. And with such a friend we will together form a team, like a soccer team. This will be a fighting team."

"[I admire] your wisdom and strength. [...] We are with you and with Iran forever. As long as we remain united we will be able to defeat [U.S.] imperialism, but if we are divided they will push us aside."

"We see here a model social state like the one we are beginning to create."

"Capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation, of the kind of misery and inequality that destroys social values. If you really look at things through the eyes of Jesus Christ - who I think was the first socialist - only socialism can really create a genuine society."

"Don’t be shameless, Mr Blair. Don’t be immoral, Mr. Blair. You are one of those who have no morals. You are not one who has the right to criticize anyone about the rules of the international community. You are an imperialist pawn who attempts to curry favor with Danger Bush-Hitler, the number one mass murderer and assassin there is on the planet. Go straight to hell, Mr. Blair."

"You messed up with me, birdie. No? You don't know much about history. You don't know much about anything, you know? A great ignorance is what you've got. You are ignorant, Mr. Danger. You are an ignorant. You are a donkey, Mr. Danger … By that I mean, you know, to say it with all its letters, to Mr. George W. Bush. You are a donkey, Mr. Bush. I'm going to tell you something, Mr. Danger. You are a coward, you know? You are a coward. Why don't you go to Iraq and command your army? It's so easy to command an army from afar. If you ever come up with the crazy idea of invading Venezuela, I'll be waiting for you in this savanna, Mr. Danger. Come on here, Mr. Danger. Come on here. Come on here, Mr. Danger. Coward, assassin, genocidal... Genocidal, you are a genocidal. You are an alcoholic, a drunk.. A drunk, Mr. Danger. You are immoral, Mr. Danger... You are the worst ever, Mr. Danger … The worst of this planet, the very worst is called George W. Bush. God save the world from this menace. Because he is an assassin. A sick man, a psychologically ill man, I know it. Personally, he is a coward. But he has a lot of power. He has a lot of power. And look at what's happening in Iraq. Yesterday the world marched against the war... 70%, according to the surveys I've seen, of your own people, Mr. Danger, are against you, against the war. You are a liar, Mr. Danger. You are killing children, Mr. Danger, who aren't responsible for your illnesses, of your complexes. Your soldiers in Iraq are bombing cities. Just yesterday we were watching images of five children who were murdered by you soldiers. They're not the murderers. You are the murderer, coward!"

"Before anything else I would like to say good day to all of the Venezuelan people, and this Boliviarian message is directed to the brave soldiers in the Parachutist Regimen of Aragua and the Armed Brigade of Valencia. Friends: For now, lamentably, the objectives we considered were not achieved in the capital. That is to say, we here in Caracas have not managed to take power. You did very well over there, but now is the time to reflect; new situations will come and the country must definitively get on the path to a better destiny. So hear my word; hear Commander Chávez, who sends you this message so that you may please reflect and put down your weapons, because now, really, the objectives that we have brought to the national level are impossible to achieve. Friends: Hear this message of solidarity. I thank you for your loyalty, your valor, your exuberance, and I, before this country and before you all, assume responsibility for this Boliviarian militant movement. Thank you."

"Enough already with the imperialist aggression! Down with the U.S. empire! It must be said, in the entire world: Down with the empire!"

"We do not believe in this paradigm of the Western capitalist, bourgeois democratic world. Nor do we believe in the fallen paradigm of the Soviet Union: communism, the classless society, without the State, of absolute equality. That doesn't exist. So, faced with that reality, we have proposed, after thinking and analyzing it, the need to rescue what is ours."

"…We present to our generation and our compatriots [ideas that are not finished] for the design of a long-range project, in which the ideological is fundamental, but it must be developed like all the other facets or lines of the Simón Bolívar project, which accepts experiences from any country, trend, any historical era, etc. The tree has to be a circumference, it has to accept ideas of all kinds, from the right, from the left, from the ideological ruins of these old capitalist or communist systems, and there are elements or ruins that are gigantic and we must take them."

"The model that we are designing, inventing, surely has elements of socialism, of capitalism, of the human being. From that point of view, for example, we have called the economic model humanistic... And it is made up of three broad factors: one, is the State, and the need for an effective State, which regulates, drives, promotes, etc. the economic process; the need for a market, but one that is healthy, where the laws of supply and demand are truly met relatively, not a monopolized or oligopolized market. And the third factor: the man, the human being. That is why we have talked about a humanist economics project. There are undoubtedly different elements there. It is not a pure, new, totally original model but rather it takes elements from the various models, from various currents, that have been prevailing in the world in the last 200 years. But that remains in our projects, in the transition project."

"The Bolivarian National Front would like to count on many Marxists...as long as we do not fall into political radicalism. I believe that the unity of those currents that are revolutionary Marxists, revolutionary Christian Marxists, revolutionary Bolivarians is necessary in order to seek an authentically revolutionary path but proper to our reality, proper to our idiosyncrasy, to our goals and possibilities."

"Marx collects historical currents of an era, reworks them and therein lies his genius, he contextualizes them, theorizes them and launches his thesis that gained strength and traveled half the world. I wouldn't say that Marxism is dead. A model that was tried to be put into practice collapsed and we see the result. Now, as a method of historical analysis of society, as a banner of struggles of social and political sectors of Latin America and the world, it has validity. There are things that I do not share about Marxism, especially in the praxis that was developed, but as an ideological flag I believe that it is valid and that it is still an idea-strength of revolutionary sectors, fighters."

"We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world"

"In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and in 1991 the Soviet Union fell, and then the victorious banner of neoliberalism was raised and the thesis of the end of history emerged, history is over, well, capitalism won, they said back in the early 90's, the end of history, the thesis of single thinking, there are no more alternatives. You see, a whole century has gone by and the Soviet Union is over and socialism is over, and communism is over and long live neo-liberal capitalism and all this fairy tale. Now, in Venezuela almost at the same time, a surprising parallelism, in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, but in 1989 also in Caracas a people rose up and there was a popular rebellion of very high intensity, thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the poor people above all, took to the streets in rebellion. Unarmed but in rebellion What did the people of Caracas rebel against on February 27, 1989? Against the neoliberal package imposed by the International Monetary Fund."

"He was an asshole to believe them."

"Dr Insulza is quite an idiot, a true idiot. The insipid Dr Insulza should resign from the secretariat of the OAS for daring to play that role."