Quotes

[from a 1957 "New York Times" interview] Power does not interest me. After victory I want to go back to my village and just be a lawyer again.

[text from a 1953 speech. The last line is considered his most famous quote ever] I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.

I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews.

I would not vote for the mayor. It's not just because he didn't invite me to dinner, but because on my way into town from the airport there were such enormous potholes.

I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement.

How can we help President [Barack Obama]?

Sorry, I'm still a dialectical materialist.

The revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

A revolution is not a bed of roses.

North Americans don't understand . . . that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity.

I am Fidel Castro and we have come to liberate Cuba.

The universities are available only to those who share my revolutionary beliefs.

I am a Marxist Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

I neither will aspire to nor will I accept the position of president of the council of state and commander in chief.

A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating . . . because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.

There is not Communism or Marxism, but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy.

I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.

They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?

I never saw a contradiction between the ideas that sustain me and the ideas of that symbol, of that extraordinary figure, Jesus Christ.

My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn't work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

Men do not shape destiny; destiny produces the man for the hour.

No thieves, no traitors, no interventionists! This time the revolution is for real!

More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World.

Propaganda is vital--propaganda is the heart of our struggle.

These long-haired walk around with their transistor radios listening to imperialist music! They corrupt the morals of young girls -- and destroy posters of Che! What do they think? That this a bourgeois liberal regime? NO! There's nothing liberal in us! We are collectivists! We are communists! There will be no Prague Spring here!

These long-haired youths walk around with their transistor radios listening to imperialist music! They corrupt the morals of young girls -- and destroy posters of Che! That this is a bourgeois regime? NO! There is nothing liberal in us! We are collectivists! We are communists! There will be no Prague Spring here!