Great Throughts Treasury

"The victory of the Cuban Revolution will be a tangible demonstration before all the Americas that peoples are capable of rising up, that they can rise up by themselves right under the very fangs of the monster."

"The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"They tell me if you see a slave sleeping do not wake him lest he dreamed of freedom and tell them if you see a slave sleeping and told him about freedom"

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

"War is always a struggle in which each contender tries to annihilate the other. Besides using force, they will have recourse to all possible tricks and stratagems to achieve the goal."

"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?"

"This is the new man must be proactive, he has to develop his individual, and to be personal creative; In order to build the new society we do not need to dolls shaking her head approval on everything, but on the contrary, we need to militants active, not working for personal interests, but also participate in building a socialist society with creativity."

"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."

"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]."

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary.... These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution!"

"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 that 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."

"Violence is not the monopoly of the exploiters and as such the exploited can use it too and, moreover, ought to use it when the moment arrives."

"Until victory always."

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

"We brought ten thousand head of cattle to the Sierra one day and said to the peasants, simply, "Eat". And the peasants, for the first time in years and years, some for the first time in their lives, ate beef."

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

"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."

"We should not allow the word "democracy" to be utilized apologetically to represent the dictatorship of the exploiting classes."

"We believe that the state is capable of understanding the needs of the nation; as such, then, the state must participate in the administration and direction of the university."

"When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a Newtonian or of a biologist when asked if he is a Pasteurian. There are truths so evident, so much a part of the peoplesÂ’ knowledge, that it is now useless to debate them. One should be a Marxist with the same naturalness with which one is a Newtonian in physics or a Pasteurian. If new facts bring about new concepts, the latter will never take away that portion of truth possessed by those that have come before. Such is the case, for example, of Einsteinian relativity or of PlanckÂ’s quantum theory in relation to NewtonÂ’s discoveries. They take absolutely nothing away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it achieved new concepts of space. The learned Englishman was the necessary stepping-stone for that. Obviously, one can point to certain mistakes of Marx, as a thinker and as an investigator of the social doctrines and of the capitalist system in which he lived. We Latin Americans, for example, cannot agree with his interpretation of Bolivar, or with his and EngelsÂ’ analysis of the Mexicans, which accepted as fact certain theories of race or nationality that are unacceptable today. But the great men who discover brilliant truths live on despite their small faults and these faults serve only to show us they were human. That is to say, they were human beings who could make mistakes, even given the high level of consciousness achieved by these giants of human thought. This is why we recognize the essential truths of Marxism as part of humanityÂ’s body of cultural and scientific knowledge. We accept it with the naturalness of something that requires no further argument."

"We will not have what we live for... If we are not willing to die for him."

"When it was all of us realist impossible dream, but in my heart do not throw."

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

"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."

"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."

"You have to fight for every breath and send death to hell."

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

"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."

"Words that do not match deeds are unimportant."

"You have to harden, but without ever losing tenderness."

"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."