Ernesto Che Guevara Quotes: 258 Powerful Words that Ignite Passion and Challenge Perspectives

“Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel!”

Ernesto Che Guevara

As quoted in An American Savage (2003) by J. Flash (Jeff Flashinski), p. 144
Variant: Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel.

“Revolution, in history, is like the doctor assisting at the birth of a new life, who will not use forceps unless necessary, but who will use them unhesitatingly every time labor requires them. It is a labor bringing the hope of a better life to the enslaved and exploited masses.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Method of Guerrilla Warfare (1963)

Life , Hope , History , Birth

“Now in the mountains and fields of America, on its flatlands and in its jungles, in the wilderness or in the traffic of cities, on the banks of its great oceans or rivers, this world is beginning to tremble. Anxious hands are stretched forth, ready to die for what is theirs, to win those rights that were laughed at by one and all for 500 years.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Address to the United Nations (1964)

World , Mountain

“There are no other alternatives; either a socialist revolution or a make-believe revolution.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Message to the Tricontinental (1967)

“The people did not talk about reciprocal concessions but demanded liberties and guarantees, which brought inevitably in many sectors a crueler war than the French would have waged otherwise.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

People's War, People's Army (1964)

War , People

“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”

Ernesto Che Guevara

execution wall
As quoted in The Cuban Revolution : Years of Promise (2005) by Teo A. Babun and Victor Andres Triay, p. 57, citing "Che Guevara: Assassin and Bumbler" by Humberto Fontova from Mensnewsdaily.com, 2 March 2004; Fontava does not identify a source for Guevara's statement.
Disputed

Men , Hate , Motivation

“The only way to solve the problems now besetting mankind is to eliminate completely the exploitation of dependent countries by developed capitalist countries, with all the consequences that this implies.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

On Development (1964)

Way , Problem , Dependency , Country

“How close we could look into a bright future should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Message to the Tricontinental (1967)

World , Future

“The struggle against imperialism, for liberation from colonial or neocolonial shackles, which is being carried out by means of political weapons, arms, or a combination of the two, is not separate from the struggle against backwardness and poverty. Both are stages on the same road leading toward the creation of a new society of justice and plenty.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Afro-Asian Conference (1965)

Justice

“In order to develop a new culture, work must acquire a new status. Human beings-as-commodities cease to exist, and a system is installed that establishes a quota for the fulfillment of one's social duty. The means of production belong to society, and the machine is merely the trench where duty is performed.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

“We do assert, however, that we must follow the road of liberation even though it may cost millions of nuclear war victims. In the struggle to death between two systems we cannot think of anything but the final victory of socialism or its relapse as a consequence of the nuclear victory of imperialist aggression.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Tactics and Strategy of the Latin American Revolution (1962)

Death , War , Thinking , Victory

“The guerrilla is supported by the peasant and worker masses of the region and of the whole territory in which it acts. Without these prerequisites, guerrilla warfare is not possible.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Method of Guerrilla Warfare (1963)

Support

“In order to know about the illnesses of society, you have to know what men are suffering from, how they suffer.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

As quoted in Testimonies About Che (2006) by Marta Rojas, p. 85

Men , Suffering

“Now a willpower that I have polished with an artist's delight will sustain some shaky legs and some weary lungs. I will do it. Give a thought once in awhile to this little soldier of fortune of the twentieth century.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Last Letter to his Parents (1965)

“Marxism was applied according to the concrete historical situation of Vietnam and because of the guiding role of the vanguard party, faithful to its people and consequently to its doctrine, a resounding victory was achieved over the (French) imperialists.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

People's War, People's Army (1964)

People , Faith , Victory

“The North American government used the quota system on imports of Cuban sugar not only to protect her own sugar industry, as demanded by her own producers, but also to make possible the unrestricted introduction into our country of North American manufactured goods.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

The Cuban Economy (1964)

Country

“What is important, however, is that each day individuals are acquiring ever more consciousness of the need for their incorporation into society and, at the same time, of their importance as the motor of that society.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Time

“Peaceful coexistence cannot be limited to the powerful countries if we want to ensure world peace. Peaceful coexistence must be exercised among all states, regardless of size, regardless of the previous historical relations that linked them, and regardless of the problems that may arise among some of them at a given moment.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Address to the United Nations (1964)

World , Peace , Exercises , Problem

“Real revolutionaries adorn themselves on the inside, not on the surface.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

As quoted in Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (2010) by John Lee Anderson, p. 178

“The law of value is no longer simply a reflection of the relations of production; the monopoly capitalists — even while employing purely empirical methods — surround that law with a complicated scaffolding that turns it into a docile servant. The superstructure imposes a kind of art in which the artist must be educated. Rebels are subdued by the machine, and only exceptional talents may create their own work. The rest become shamefaced hirelings or are crushed.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Education , Law , Art

“We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it: to his home, to his centers of entertainment; a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be; make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move. Then his moral fiber shall begin to decline. He will even become more beastly, but we shall notice how the signs of decadence begin to appear.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Message to the Tricontinental (1967)

War , Peace , Feeling , Home

“At that moment Marx puts himself in a position where he becomes the necessary target of all who have a special interest in maintaining the old-similar to Democritus before him, whose work was burned by Plato and his disciples, the ideologues of Athenian slave aristocracy. Beginning with the revolutionary Marx, a political group with concrete ideas establishes itself. Basing itself on the giants, Marx and Engels, and developing through successive steps with personalities like Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and the new Soviet and Chinese rulers, it establishes a body of doctrine and, let us say, examples to follow.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Notes on the Cuban Revolution (1960)

Idea , Success , Personality

“The university should color itself black and color itself mulatto—not just as regards students but also professors.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Speech at the University of Las Villas (1959)

Color , Universe

“We are doing everything possible to give labor this new status of social duty and to link it on the one side with the development of a technology which will create the conditions for greater freedom, and on the other side with voluntary work based on a Marxist appreciation of the fact that man truly reaches a full human condition when he produces without being driven by the physical need to sell his labor as a commodity.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Freedom

“Today the people stand at the door of the university, and it is the university that must be flexible. It must color itself black, mulatto, worker, peasant, or else be left without doors. And then the people will tear it apart and paint it with the colors they see fit.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Speech at the University of Las Villas (1959)

People , Color , Tear , Universe

“The interests of the IMF represent the big international interests that today seem to be established and concentrated in Wall Street.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Regarding the IMF, in an interview for Radio Rivadavia of Argentina (3 November 1959)

“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.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

On Revolutionary Medicine (1960)

Time

“When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken.”

Ernesto Che Guevara book Guerrilla Warfare

Source: Guerrilla Warfare (1961), Ch. I: 1. Essence of Guerrilla Warfare

Peace , Law

“Our universities produced lawyers and doctors for the old social system, but did not create enough agricultural extension teachers, agronomists, chemists, or physicists. In fact, we do not even have mathematicians.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Speech to University students (1959)

Teachers , Universe

“The guerrilla fighter, who is general of himself, need not die in every battle… [a guerrilla fighter] is ready to die, not to defend an ideal, but rather to convert it into reality.”

Ernesto Che Guevara book Guerrilla Warfare

Source: Guerrilla Warfare (1960), Ch. 1: General Principles of Guerrilla Warfare

Reality

“I leave a people who received me as a son. That wounds a part of my spirit. I carry to new battlefronts the faith that you taught me, the revolutionary spirit of my people, the feeling of fulfilling the most sacred of duties: to fight against imperialism wherever it may be.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Farewell letter to Fidel Castro (1965)

People , Faith , Feeling , Fight

“Cuba became the sugar-producing and-exporting country par excellence; and if she did not develop even further in this respect, the reason is to be found in the capitalist contradictions which put a limit to a continuous expansion of the Cuban sugar industry, which depended almost entirely on North American capital.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

The Cuban Economy (1964)

Dependency , Country

“One ought to be "Marxist' with the same naturalness with which one is "Newtonian" in physics, or "Pasteurian" in biology, considering that if facts determine new concepts, these new concepts will never divest themselves of that portion of truth possessed by the older concepts they have outdated.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Notes on the Cuban Revolution (1960)

Truth , Nature

“In a revolution one wins or dies, if it is a real one.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

In a revolution, one triumphs or dies (if it is a true revolution).
Farewell letter to Fidel Castro (1965)

“In order to change a way of thinking, it is necessary to undergo profound internal changes and to witness profound external changes, especially in the performance of our duties and obligations to society.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

On Revolutionary Medicine (1960)

Way , Thinking , Change

“Wealth is far from being within the reach of the masses simply through the process of appropriation.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Wealth

“I think the place to start is to recognize the individual's quality of incompleteness, of being an unfinished product. The vestiges of the past are brought into the present in one's consciousness, and a continual labor is necessary to eradicate them.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Thinking , Past

“I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ…. I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don't get nailed to a cross or any other place.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Letter to his mother (July 15, 1956) as quoted in Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (1997) by Jon Lee Anderson ISBN 0802116000

Christ , Fight , Dead

“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 in order to achieve the goal.”

Ernesto Che Guevara book Guerrilla Warfare

Source: Guerrilla Warfare (1961), Ch. I: 1. Essence of Guerrilla Warfare

War

“Your father has been a man who acted according to his beliefs and certainly has been faithful to his convictions.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Letter to his Children (1965)

Faith

“We must remember that machines do not, as in the capitalist system, compete with workers or enslave workers. Workers must view machines as the liberators of their force. Machines are placed at the service of workers as soon as the exploitation of man by man stops. And that is what we are striving for: we are trying to turn machines into liberating instruments of peasants, so they will have more time for leisure, so they will have more time to study, to develop in every sense, to achieve the most important thing we must achieve: individuals developed to the full, this is the aim we are all struggling for.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Speech at the National Sugar Plenary Meeting in Camagüey, February 9, 1963 Ernesto Che Guevera. Escritos y discursos. Op. cit., vol. 7.
On Automation (1963)

Sense , Study , Time

“The fault of many of our artists and intellectuals lies in their original sin: they are not true revolutionaries. We can try to graft the elm tree so that it will bear pears, but at the same time we must plant pear trees. New generations will come that will be free of original sin.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Tree , Time

“The solidarity of all progressive forces of the world towards the people of Vietnam today is similar to the bitter irony of the plebeians coaxing on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a matter of wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to his death or to victory.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Message to the Tricontinental (1967)

Death , Fate , People , World

“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 us all.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

Afro-Asian Conference (1965)