Who is Che Guevara
Che Guevara, byname of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, (born June 14, 1928, Rosario, Argentina—died October 9, 1967, La Higuera, Bolivia), theoretician and tactician of guerrilla warfare, prominent communist figure in the Cuban Revolution (1956–59), and guerrilla leader in South America. After his execution by the Bolivian army, he was regarded as a martyred hero by generations of leftists worldwide, and his image became an icon of leftist radicalism and anti-imperialism.
Guevara was the eldest of five children in a middle-class family of Spanish-Irish descent and leftist leanings. Although suffering from asthma, he excelled as an athlete and a scholar, completing his medical studies in 1953. He spent many of his holidays traveling in Latin America, and his observations of the great poverty of the masses contributed to his eventual conclusion that the only solution lay in violent revolution. He came to look upon Latin America not as a collection of separate nations but as a cultural and economic entity, the liberation of which would require an intercontinental strategy.
Che Guevara Quotes
1. 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.
2. If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.
3. We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.
4. Every day People straighten up the hair, why not the heart?
5. Let the world change you and you can change the world
6. 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.
7. Be realistic, demand the impossible!
8. I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.
9. I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.
10. The first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated.
11. Silence is argument carried out by other means.
12. 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.
13. I would rather die standing up to live life on my knees.
14. 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.
15. I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people.
16. Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.
17. There is no other definition of socialism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.
18. I will fight with all the weapons within my reach rather than let myself be nailed to a cross or whatever.
19. 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.
20. The revolution is not an apple that falls when ripe. You have to make it fall.
21. The best form of saying is being
22. A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive.
23. I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel.
24. The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.
25. The revolution is made through human beings, but individuals must forge their revolutionary spirit day by day
26. I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.
27. One has to grow hard but without ever losing tenderness.
28. 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.
29. 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.
30. I don’t care if I fall as long as someone else picks up my gun and keeps on shooting.
31. 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.
32. El revolucionario vedadero es guiado por gran sentimientos de amor.
33. 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.
34. It’s a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even sadder not to have enemies.
35. Wrapped in a police blanket, I watched the rain and smoked one black cigarette after another.
36. I also know – and this won’t alter the course of history or your personal view of me – that you will die with a clenched fist and a tense jaw, the epitome of hatred and struggle, because you are not a symbol (some inanimate example) but a genuine member of the society to be destroyed; the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and motivates your actions. You are as useful as I am, but you are not aware of how useful your contribution is to the society that sacrifices you.
37. Man truly achieves his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity.
38. 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.
39. All night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look 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 his 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.
40. Hay que endurecerse, pero sin perder la ternura jamás!
41. 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.
42. Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.
43. It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over.
44. Hay que luchar por cada bocanada de aire y enviar la muerte al carajo.
45. I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people. I know this, I see it printed in the night sky that I, eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or the trenches , will take my bloodstained weapon, and consumed with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands.
46. The spectacular landscape circling the fortress supplies an essential backdrop, inspiring dreamers to wander its ruins for the sake of it; North American tourists, bound down by their practical world view, are able to place those members of the disintegrating tribes they may have seen in their travels among these once-living walls, unaware of the moral distance separating them, since only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp the subtle differences.
47. 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.
48. We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press. Newspapers are instruments of the oligarchy.
49. 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.
50. Todos los días la gente se arregla el cabello, ¿por qué no el corazón?
51. 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.
52. Don’t Shoot! I’m Che. I’m worth more to you alive than dead!
53. The future belongs to the people, and gradually, or in one strike, they will take power, here and in every country. The terrible thing is the people need to be educated, and this they cannot do before taking power, only after. They can only learn at the cost of their own mistakes, which will be very serious and will cost many innocent lives.
54. Its tall chimneys throw up black smoke, impregnating everything with soot, and the miners’ faces as they traveled the streets were also imbued with that ancient melancholy of smoke, unifying everything with its grayish monotones, a perfect coupling with the gray mountain days.
55. 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. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.
56. 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.
57. 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.
58. 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].
59. 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.
60. Adherence to principles, and adherence to the individual, combine to make the Rebel Army an indivisible fist.
