Ernesto Che Guevara Quotes

It's a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even sadder not to have enemies.

Adherence to principles, and adherence to the individual, combine to make the Rebel Army an indivisible fist.

The dramatic news is confirmed: Che has died in combat. His belongings are described in vivid detail and other information is given that only those close to the scene could have known. The

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… And I began to see there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and this was helping those people.

American capitalism replaced some of the old colonial capitalisms in the countries that began their independent life. But it knows that this is transitory and that there is no real security for its financial speculation in these new territories. The octopus cannot there apply its suckers firmly. The claw of the imperial eagle is trimmed. Colonialism is dead or is dying a natural death in all these places.

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

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. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón [execution wall].

Che is transformed into a hardened symbol of resistance, a symbol of the fight for what is just, of passion, of the necessity of being fully human, multiplied infinitely in the ideals and weapons of those who struggle. This is what the front men and their omnipotent handlers fear.

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

His wife spotted the danger in our resolutely bohemian ways.
"You have only one year left before you qualify as a doctor and yet you're going away? You have no idea when you'll be back? But why?"
We couldn't give precise answers to her desperate questions and this horrified her ...

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.

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. 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.

Don't Shoot! I'm Che. I'm worth more to you alive than dead!

I would rather die standing up to live life on my knees.

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.

A petty concern with mere evidence is an antiquated and bourgeois feature of the captalist legal system. We are revolutionaries. We convict from a revolutionary passion.

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. But the killing of persons of small importance is never advisable, since it brings on an increase of reprisals, including deaths.

After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And 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.

The psychological effects of the sun are strange: it had not yet appeared over the horizon and we already felt comforted, just imagining the heat it would bring.

Hay que ser duro pero jamas perder la ternura.
[It is necessary to be hard but never to lose the tenderness]

Valdivia's actions symbolize man's indefatigable thirst to take control of a place where he can exercise total authority. That phrase, attributed to Caesar, proclaiming he would rather be first-in-command in some humble Alpine village than second-in-command in Rome, is repeated less pompously, but no less effectively, in the epic campaign that is the conquest of Chile. If, in the moment the conquistador was facing death at the hands of tht invincible Araucanian Caupolican, he had not been overwhelmed with fury, like a hunted animal, I do not doubt that judging his life, Valdivia would have felt death was fully justified. He belonged to that special class of men the species produces every so often, in whom a craving for limitless power is so extreme that any suffering to achieve it seems natural, and he had become the omnipotent ruler of a warrior nation.

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.

If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.

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.

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.

I don't care if I fall as long as someone else picks up my gun and keeps on shooting.

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.

One has to grow hard but without ever losing tenderness.

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.

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.

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

Be realistic, demand the impossible!

Some give the impression they go on living only because it's a habit they cannot shake

Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates ... Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service, should learn to think and act as a mass.

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.

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

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.

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.

At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of our own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, 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.

Let the world change you and you can change the world

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 - its meaningful noises can be interpreted any way you choose.

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.

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

This edition of The Motorcycle Diaries, the notes describing a journey made without hesitation, aboard the noisy motorcycle La Poderosa II (which gave out halfway, but only after transmitting to the adventure a joyous impulse we, too, receive), free as the wind, with the sole purpose of getting to know the world, is dedicated to people whose youth is not merely sequential, but wholehearted and spiritual.

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.

Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.

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.