Top 100 Quotes About Che Guevara
#1. I remember it as if it were today ... seeing him [Che] framed in the viewfinder, with that expression. I am still startled by the impact ... it shakes me so powerfully. (On his iconic photo of Che Guevara)
Alberto Korda
#2. And if there's any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.
Phil Ochs
#3. Quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara ... are as germane to our highly technological, computerized society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.
Saul Alinsky
#4. I think a lot of people saw 'Fight Club' and thought, 'Right, here's our next Che Guevara, here's our next Fidel Castro, here's someone who's going to wave the flag.' And I was like, 'No, it's just a book. And if I beat that drum, if I play that song one more time, I won't have a career.'
Chuck Palahniuk
#5. Everyone who ever did anything revolutionary was just an eighteen-year-old kid once. George Washington, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela ... Social status is just a social construct, the primary function of which is to keep regular people oppressed and rebels in line.
Matthew Quick
#6. There's something about his eyes in the photo. A kind of mystery. His personality comes through. It's always hung on my walls and I've given it to many people as a present. (On his iconic photo of Che Guevara)
Alberto Korda
#7. Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead.
Jon Lee Anderson
#8. In the Communist period, the revolutionaries, the leaders were almost always - Che Guevara, people like that - they were always from the middle class and the educated. And empathy is a very powerful emotion.
Hamza Yusuf
#9. Joshua needed to eat something before embarking upon it, and hence stood in line behind an overtattooed prick who couldn't decide between banana and pumpkin bread, while the barista in a Che Guevara hat (yet presumably fluent in Middle fucking English) looked on indifferently.
Aleksandar Hemon
#10. Like Che Guevara, he'd appear wearing his beret, his pointed beard with the drooping mustache, and the cocksure swagger of someone who has just planted dynamite all over Cambridge and couldn't wait to trigger the fuse, but not before coffee and a croissant.
Andre Aciman
#11. I've made a poster at home. You know the iconic image of Che Guevara, the black and red graphic of his face? I think it's the perfect graphic, the best graphic ever made. I cut a Concorde out and put it over his head so it's Che looking up and the Concorde going by. Both are dead, maybe obsolete.
Aleksandra Mir
#12. 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.
Hugo Chavez
#13. Russian young people spend countless hours online downloading videos and having a very nice digital entertainment lifestyle, which does not necessarily turn them into the next Che Guevara.
Evgeny Morozov
#14. Many of us today owe the few attractive and redeeming features of our existence to the sixties, and Che Guevara personifies that era ... better than anyone" (Castaneda 1997:410).
Richard L. Harris
#15. I spent a great deal of time with Che Guevara while I was in Havana. I believe he was far less a mercenary than he was a freedom fighter.
Maureen O'Hara
#16. There is a bit of vanity hiding somewhere within every one of us," Che wrote afterward. "It made me feel like the proudest man on earth that day." From then on, to all but his closest friends, he was Comandante Che Guevara.
Anonymous
#17. I'm a secret nonmember of the establishment. This isn't a grubby kind of revolution I'm talking about. This isn't Che Guevara stuff. I don't want to live on berries in the woods - I don't think anybody does.
Louis O. Kelso
#18. Che Guevara's life is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom. We will always honor his memory.
Nelson Mandela
#20. Intellectuals and celebrities venerated monsters like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, & Ho Chi Minh. The New Left of the 1960s didn't have a change of heart, just a change of icons from Stalin to third world tyrants. The homicidal and sadistic Che Guevara is still held up as a hero ...
Jamie Glazov
#21. The death of Che Guevara places a responsibility on all revolutionaries of the World to redouble their decision to fight on to the final defeat of Imperialism. That is why in essence Che Guevara is not dead, his ideas are with us.
Stokely Carmichael
#22. Remember when Jay-Z wore a Che Guevara T-shirt? Nobody knew who Che was. Then Jay-Z wears it, and it's everywhere.
Lamar Odom
#23. I like tricks; I like to dazzle. Dribbling and leaving your opponent on his backside is what life is for. If I achieve what I want to, then I'll mark a distinct era in football. I'm the Che Guevara of modern soccer.
Sergio Aguero
#24. Wars stopped slavery in America and liberated Europe and put an end to Japanese imperialism and killed Hitler and Mussolini and Pol Pot and Che Guevara and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That's why we have them.
David NMI Stone
#25. The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event ... it was an argument.
Umberto Eco
#26. Welcome to the First International Red Fighting Brigade of the Moscow Metropolitan in the name of Ernesto Che Guevara!
Dmitry Glukhovsky
#27. I'm not just influenced by the '60s - it's who I am. I grew up with Allen Ginsberg and Che Guevara. I flirted with various forms of communism when it was way out of style. It was this really strange and creative time in music and culture, and it was fabulous.
Thom Mayne
#28. They sought out rap music to attack, but you don't hear that anymore because it made too much money. They use Che Guevara to sell soft drinks. If something comes out that is radical and it's successful, then it's no longer radical. It's co-opted.
John Landis
#29. The interests of the IMF represent the big international interests that today seem to be established and concentrated in Wall Street.
Che Guevara
#30. I have a wish. It as a fear as well - that in my end will be my beginning.
Che Guevara
#31. The myth of the self-made man, has to be profoundly hypocritical: it is the self-serving demonstration that a lie is the truth
Che Guevara
#33. 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.
Che Guevara
#34. 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.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#35. It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.
Che Guevara
#36. How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?
Che Guevara
#37. Imperialism has been defeated in many partial battles. But it remains a considerable force in the world, and we cannot expect its final defeat save through effort and sacrifice on the part of all of us.
Che Guevara
#38. Guerrilla warfare is used by the side which is supported by a majority but which possesses a much smaller number of arms for use in defense against oppression.
Che Guevara
#39. Youth should learn to think and act as a mass. It is criminal to think as individuals!
Che Guevara
#40. Adherence to principles, and adherence to the individual, combine to make the Rebel Army an indivisible fist.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#41. 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.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#43. Direct aggression against Cuba would mean nuclear war. The Americans speak about such aggression as if they did not know or did not want to accept this fact. I have no doubt they would lose such a war.
Che Guevara
#44. 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.
Che Guevara
#45. The guerrilla band is not to be considered inferior to the army against which it fights simply because it is inferior in fire power.
Che Guevara
#47. One must endure without losing tenderness.
Che Guevara
#48. Democracy cannot consist solely of elections that are nearly always fictitious and managed by rich landowners and professional politicians.
Che Guevara
#49. The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese.
Che Guevara
#50. We should not go to the [poor countries] and say: 'We come to ... teach you our science, to show you your errors.' ... We should go instead with an inquiring mind and a humble spirit to learn [from] these people.
Che Guevara
#51. One does not necessarily have to wait for a revolutionary situation: it can be created.
Che Guevara
#52. Passion is needed for any great work, and for the revolution, passion and audacity are required in big doses.
Che Guevara
#53. We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#54. We are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.
Che Guevara
#55. In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm.
Che Guevara
#56. To accomplish much you must first lose everything.
Che Guevara
#57. Everyday you have to fight so that love for humanity can be transformed into concrete deeds, into acts that set an example, that mobilize.
Che Guevara
#58. Democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy.
Che Guevara
#59. If they attack, we shall fight to the end. If the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York, in our defense against aggression. But we haven't got them, so we shall fight with what we've got.
Che Guevara
#60. How easy it is to govern when one follows a system of consulting the will of the people and one holds as the only norm all the actions which contribute to the well being of the people.
Che Guevara
#62. The negro is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.
Che Guevara
#63. There are no borders in this fight to the death; we cannot be indifferent to what is happening in any part of the world.
Che Guevara
#64. We must not return to the practice of hiding our defects so they may not be seen. That would be neither honest nor revolutionary.
Che Guevara
#65. 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.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#66. I wanted to take part in the liberation of even a small piece of enslaved Latin America.
Che Guevara
#68. Mexicans are a band of illiterate Indians.
Che Guevara
#69. 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.
Che Guevara
#70. Each spilt drop of blood, in any country under whose flag one has not been born, is an experience passed on to those who survive, to be added later to the liberation struggle of his own country. And each nation liberated is a phase won in the battle for the liberation of one's own country.
Che Guevara
#71. When fate and love come into conflict, the former must always win; for love will fade if it rests upon indignity or abdication.
Jorge G. Castaneda
#72. I would probably have more in common with a whale than with a bourgeois married couple employed at worthy institutions that I would wipe from the face of the earth if it was given to me to do so.
Che Guevara
#73. I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel ...
Che Guevara
#74. When forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law, peace is considered already broken.
Che Guevara
#75. Wrapped in a police blanket, I watched the rain and smoked one black cigarette after another ...
Ernesto Che Guevara
#76. A smoke in times of rest is a great companion to the solitary soldier.
Che Guevara
#77. It is an illusion to think that the matter cannot be resolved through words.
Che Guevara
#78. Every person has the truth in his heart. No matter how complicated his circumstances, no matter how others look at him from the outside, and no matter how deep or shallow the truth dwells in his heart, once his heart is pieced with a crystal needle, the truth will gush forth like a geyser.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#79. It's a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even sadder not to have enemies.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#80. We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla is a social reformer, who takes up arms responding to the angry protests of the people against their oppressors, and who fights to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and poverty.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#81. The desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals serves no purpose if one works alone.
Che Guevara
#82. I had a project for my life which involved 10 years of wandering, then some years of medical studies and, if any time was left, the great adventure of physics.
Che Guevara
#83. In a revolution, one triumphs or dies.
Che Guevara
#84. Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#85. Allow me to say, at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#86. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.
Che Guevara
#87. 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.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#88. The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination.
Che Guevara
#89. Better to die standing, than to live on your knees.
Che Guevara
#90. Americans are given the sole option of electing their jailer for four years and sometimes do him the honour of re-electing him.
Che Guevara
#91. 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.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#92. 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.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#93. I will fight with all the weapons within my reach rather than let myself be nailed to a cross or whatever.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#94. The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!
Che Guevara
#95. 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.
Che Guevara
#96. Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel.
Che Guevara
#97. 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.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#98. A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the The Wall!
Che Guevara
#99. I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#100. We must do away with all newspapers. A revolution cannot be accomplished with freedom of the press.
Che Guevara
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