Ernesto Quotes & Sayings

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara

Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars? — Ernesto Sabato

We all share in the same cosmic rhythm ... For all natural laws are like the rhythm of the strings of the harp. — Ernesto Cardenal

In life you need courage to fight the dragons. The ones who live inside and the ones who live outside — Ernesto Neto

Fortunately, both governments have been in favor of studying the Mexican migration problem in greater depth. For the first time, I think, we will have something scientifically sound that says something about this phenomenon. The study is ongoing, and I hope that, with a push from both of us, it will provide a sound basis for serious public discussion on the migration issue. — Ernesto Zedillo

All human eyes have longing in them. — Ernesto Cardenal

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara

The revolution in Nicaragua was the first of its kind to be accomplished with the mass support of Christians, a fact that cannot fail to influence the further development of revolutionary movements in the whole of Latin America, whose inhabitants are predominantly Christian. — Ernesto Cardenal

I speak of the current civilization and I consider her not as a symbol but as victim-victim, really, of the commercialization, of the falsification of this real world. That is my theme. — Ernesto Cardenal

The death of the entrepreneur is solitude. — Ernesto Sirolli

... we may seek to impose severe restrictions upon what, how and when we engage with others so that the risks are statistically minimised. — Ernesto Spinelli

Coffee is a product favouring sociability, friendship, and conversation and it should always be consumed with someone else. — Ernesto Illy

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

Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship. — Ernesto Sirolli

If you have a life which is adrenaline-charged all week long because you're a powerful CEO, or you have responsibilities and you're committed to the people you look after, it's very difficult on weekends to sit around the garden. So you probably look for something which gives you the same sort of adrenaline buzz. — Ernesto Bertarelli

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

According to some liberation theologians atheism is not the cause of the conflict between Christianity and Marxism, but is rather the link between them. — Ernesto Cardenal

I really enjoy sailing on Lake Geneva because I can just look at the shore and see my wife having a barbecue with the kids. — Ernesto Bertarelli

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara

[1965]
To my children
Dear Hildita, Aleidita, Camilo, Celia, And Ernesto,
If you ever have to read this letter, it will be because I am no longer with you. You practically will not remember me, and the smaller ones will not remember me at all.
Your father has been a man who acted on his beliefs and has certainly been loyal to his convictions.
Grow up as good revolutionaries. Study hard so that you can master technology, which allows us to master nature. Remember that the revolution is what is important, and each one of us, alone is worth nothing.
Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.
Until forever, my children. I still hope to see you.
A great big kiss and a big hug from,
Papa — Ernesto Che Guevara

My work speaks of the finite and the infinite, of the macroscopic and the microscopic, the internal and external, by the masculine and feminine powers, but sex is like a snake, it slithers through everything. — Ernesto Neto

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

Nobody in the world can succeed alone. — Ernesto Sirolli

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara

Like a lover who spends all his time thinking of his distant love, God has been thinking of me since before I was born, for all eternity. — Ernesto Cardenal

The expression 'there is nothing like the good old days' does not mean that fewer bad things happened before, but fortunately, that people tend to forget about them. — Ernesto Sabato

It is in a case like this that a doctor knows he is powerless in such circumstances, that he longs for change; a change which would prevent the injustice of a system in which until a month ago this poor old woman had had to earn her living as a waitress, wheezing and panting but facing life with dignity. — Ernesto Guevara Lynch

The concept that flourished during the most glorious periods of republican Rome and that appeared in the Twelve Tables of the Law as one of the first, though as yet imperfect, affirmations of the rights of man, inspired the struggle between patricians and plebeians. — Ernesto Teodoro Moneta

A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive. — Ernesto Che Guevara

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara

Greatness is so aggressive, so dramatic! Don't you think it is almost bad manners? — Ernesto Sabato

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

I always have a plan, but it's like the plan for a journey. Once you're on the road, you change things. If nothing changes, if you end up with something that's just as you planned it, then you haven't created art. — Ernesto Neto

The best form of saying is being — Ernesto Che Guevara

Let the world change you and you can change the world — Ernesto Che Guevara

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

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara

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

The quintessential expression of coffee is espresso. — Ernesto Illy

For sheer sensory enjoyment, few everyday experiences can compete with a good cup of coffee. — Ernesto Illy

Every day People straighten up the hair, why not the heart? — Ernesto Che Guevara

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

My father was a sailor and our summer vacations were always on a sailboat. I had a little boat before I had a moped. — Ernesto Bertarelli

What we have to realize is that we are part of the crisis, and we are determining the outcome; our actions, at a personal level as well as a planetary level, are part of the solution. If we do nothing then disaster could be the final outcome. — Ernesto Ortiz

In these circumstances people in poor families who can't pay their way are surrounded by an atmosphere of barely disguised acrimony; they stop being father, mother, sister or brother and become a purely negative factor in the struggle for life and, by extension, a source of bitterness for the healthy members of the community who resent their illness as if it were a personal insult to those who have to support them. — Ernesto Che Guevara

Criminals are the most decent and least offensive people among us. — Ernesto Sabato

The first principle of aid is respect. — Ernesto Sirolli

Ernesto Palmer got the name Chili originally because he was hot-tempered as a kid ... Now he was Chili, Tommy Carlo said, because he had chilled down and didn't need the hot temper. All he had to do was turn his eyes dead when he looked at a slow pay, not say more than three words, and the guy would sell his wife's car to make the payment. — Elmore Leonard

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

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara

Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst intentions. And society, without realizing it respects and even exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion, since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and there is no other. — Ernesto Sabato

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara

I began to write poetry when I was about four years old. In other words, I've always been writing poetry. — Ernesto Cardenal

I think that the proclamation of the Gospel is sometimes nearer to an atheistic point of view than to traditional religious attitudes. — Ernesto Cardenal

Read the inscription," he said. I opened the book. On the flyleaf it said: "To Hilda, so that on the day we part the substance of my hopes for the future and my predestined struggle will remain with you. Ernesto 20-1-55. — Hilda Gadea

The first time I passed through the country (Switzerland) I had the impression it was swept down with a broom from one end to the other every morning by housewives who dumped all the dirt in Italy. — Ernesto Sabato

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood. — Marguerite Duras

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

The first commandment for every good explorer is that an expedition has two points: the point of departure and the point of arrival. If your intention is to make the second theoretical point coincide with the actual point of arrival, don't think about the means
because the journey is a virtual space that finishes when it finishes, and there are as many means as there are different ways of 'finishing.' That is to say, the means are endless. — Ernesto Che Guevara

I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves. — Ernesto Che Guevara

I always thought that it's important to have other things, not just work, and I often even suggested my managers take some time off and come back fresh and ready to fight again. — Ernesto Bertarelli

Only those capable of envisaging utopia will be fit for the decisive battle, that of recovering all the humanity we have lost.
— Ernesto Sabato

Many people, not least those people who come to therapy, convince themselves that there are alternative options to choose where none exist. — Ernesto Spinelli

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

You can't change who you are, but you can change what you have in your head, you can refresh what you're thinking about, you can put some fresh air in your brain. — Ernesto Bertarelli

You can't be with God and be neutral. / True contemplation is resistance. And poetry, / gazing at clouds is resistance I found out in jail.
— Ernesto Cardenal

swung between the purest love and the wildest hatred. In spite of the fact that she gave herself to me without reservation, I would suddenly be overcome with the feeling it was all a sham. For a while she would seem as innocent as a young girl, but suddenly I would be convinced she was a bitch, and then a long parade of doubts would file through my mind: where? how? how many? when? — Ernesto Sabato

What Marxism calls atheism is basically the negation of an idol, which sometimes bears the name of God. — Ernesto Cardenal

If people don't want to be helped, leave them alone. — Ernesto Sirolli

In America, it's where you end up that matters, not how you get there. As long as you get there, no one asks questions. You don't ask. You never ask. And if someone does ask how you got there? It's usually a harmless person who never got anything, never got out, died paying rent as he waited for God to deliver him. — Ernesto Quinonez

We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it. — Ernesto Che Guevara

We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press. Newspapers are instruments of the oligarchy. — Ernesto Che Guevara

There's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common: None was started by one person. — Ernesto Sirolli

Slogan-making is not poetry. — Ernesto Cardenal

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

We turn outward, attracted by the beauty we see in created things without realizing that they are only a reflection of the real beauty. And the real beauty is within us. — Ernesto Cardenal

Reasonable ideas which find their sanction in the conscience of the righteous do not die; they are consequently realities and active forces, but they are so only to the extent that those who profess them know how to turn them to account. — Ernesto Teodoro Moneta

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

I would rather die standing up to live life on my knees. — Ernesto Che Guevara

When we drink coffee, our tongue gets painted. As long as it stays painted, it remains tasty! — Ernesto Illy

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara

Wrapped in a police blanket, I watched the rain and smoked one black cigarette after another ... — Ernesto Che Guevara

This dual position suggests a basic tension or 'existential dilemma' in human living that each of us seeks to resolve: the search for, and attempt to construct, a way of being that somehow will balance our unique reflections upon our lived experience with the perceived demands and desires of being-with-others. In this sense, the fundamental project of living, for all of us, becomes the struggle to achieve relational balance between or experience of our own self-construct, our experience of others as we have construed them to be, and our experience of that 'between-ness' that emerges through our every encounter with the world. — Ernesto Spinelli

Be realistic, demand the impossible! — Ernesto Che Guevara

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

The bike struggled showing signs it was feeling the strain especially in the bodywork which we constantly had to fix with Alberto's favored spare part - wire. — Ernesto Che Guevara

Welcome to the First International Red Fighting Brigade of the Moscow Metropolitan in the name of Ernesto Che Guevara! — Dmitry Glukhovsky

My poetry is not lyric. The epigrams are lyric because they come from my youthful period of lyricism, but my other poetry is not lyric. — Ernesto Cardenal

God may do something silly at any time, because, like any lover, God does not reason. God is drunk with love. — Ernesto Cardenal

If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine. — Ernesto Che Guevara

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara

The future of every community lies in capturing the passion, imagination, and resources of its people. — Ernesto Sirolli

... capable of maintaining and advocating a stance which negated all that he had gleaned from his earlier clarifications. — Ernesto Spinelli

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

I am not interested in an economic liberation of man without the liberation of the whole man. — Ernesto Cardenal

It seems to me / the the great bards of the 20th century are in Publicity / those Keatses and Shelleys singing the Colgate smile / Cosmic Coca-Cola, the pause the refreshes, / the make of car that will take us to the land of happiness. — Ernesto Cardenal

No one painted a more accurate picture of military depredation than Vergil. Inspired though he was by the Latin spirit and by his pride in Rome, he nevertheless glorified Rome's true mission as one of providing the world with the rules of peace and justice. — Ernesto Teodoro Moneta

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 ... — Ernesto Che Guevara

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara