Fidel Castro
91 quotes
Biography
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was a Cuban communist revolutionary and statesman who was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2011. He served as prime minister from 1959 to 1976, president from 1976 to 2008, and first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1965 until 2011.
"They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?"
"I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. 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."
"Weapons for what? (¿Armas, para qué?) To fight against whom? Against the revolutionary government, that has the support of the whole people? ... Weapons for what? Hiding weapons for what? To blackmail the President of the Republic? To threaten to break the peace here? To create organizations of gangsters? Is it that we are going to return to gangsterism? Is it that we will return to daily shootouts in the capital? Weapons for what?"
"I am not a dictator, and I do not think I will become one. I will not maintain power with a machine gun."
"Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour."
"The American people, I think, is good people. Yes, they are—they have not to charge with the guilty of all the lies, that publicity...the people of United States is good people, harmonious people, wonderful people. United States people is very good people."
"I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement, but we do not have to say that we are anticommunists just to fawn on foreign powers."
"A revolution is not a trail of roses.... A revolution is a fight to the death between the future and the past."
"Fellow workers and peasants, this is the socialist and democratic revolution of the working people, with the working people, and for the working people. And for this revolution of the working people, by the working people, and for the working people we are prepared to give our lives."
"If we had paused to tell the people that we were Marxist-Leninists while we were on Pico Turquino and not yet strong, it is possible that we would never have been able to descend to the plains."
"I am a Marxist-Leninist, and I will be a Marxist-Leninist until the last days of my life."
"It is necessary that each Marxist-Leninist understand that he can contribute to Marxism-Leninism with an atom of his experience, that every solution he finds, every experience he acquires, in the act of solving a problem, will be one more experience with which he enriches Marxism-Leninism, because Marxism-Leninism has been enriched so much precisely by the experience of millions and millions of Marxist-Leninists acting in the reality of life."
"We believe that Marxism-Leninism is an incontestable truth."
"Kim Il-sung, one of the most prominent, bright and heroic socialist leaders of the present day, whose history is one of the most beautiful thing a revolutionary may have written in the service of the cause of socialism."
"The death of a fighter is not a reason to mourn, if we believe, as we have always believed, as our people have believed and as revolutionaries of every era have believed, that no true man, no true revolutionary dies in vain."
"Marx and Lenin represent precisely the two human personalities that will mark the passage between prehistory and the history of mankind."
"Fascism, with its violence, gets rid of everything: it attacks universities, it closes them and crushes them; it attacks intellectuals, represses them and persecutes them; it attacks political parties; it attacks trade union organizations; it attacks all mass and cultural organizations. Therefore, nothing is more violent, more retrograde and more illegal than fascism."
"Marxism-Leninism is an explanation of historical events; Marxism-Leninism is a guide for action, Marxism-Leninism is the ideology of the proletariat, which must guide, make its action conscious to overthrow exploiters, to establish a classless society."
"Marxism-Leninism is the ideology of the working class, the most complete political doctrine, the most accurate explanation of social and historical problems."
"Marxism-Leninism is the denial of the exploitation of man by man, that has been precisely the source of crimes, wars, oppressions and calamities that humanity has suffered over millennia."
"The figure of Lenin is a giant in history and his luminous ideas represents the common heritage of revolutionary fighters in every corner of the Earth."
"Comrade Ho Chi Minh, in a genious way, combined the struggle for national independence with the struggle for the rights of the masses oppressed by the exploiters and the feudals. He saw that the path was to combine the patriotic feelings of peoples with the need of freedom from social exploitation. National liberation and social liberation were the two pillars on which his doctrine was based. Furthermore, he saw that underdeveloped countries, in those conditions because of capitalism, could make a leap in history, building their economy along the path of socialism, saving themselves from the sacrifices and the horrors of capitalism."
"President Ho Chi Minh, understanding the extraordinary historical importance and the consequences of the glorious October Revolution, and assimilating Lenin's luminous thought, saw clearly that in Marxism-Leninism we could find the teaching and the path that had to be followed to find a solution to the problem of the peoples oppressed by colonialism."
"Fascism appears in the world precisely after the October Revolution; fascism appears in the world as a tool against Marxism-Leninism. Capitalist and imperialist countries created the conditions for the rise of fascism in the world; and the whole fascist campaign, since its first appearance in Europe, was based on anti-communism, on communists' slaughter and on the destruction of the Soviet Union."
"Democratic Korea, its leaders and its people will always live in our feelings of revolutionaries, patriots and fighters for the triumph of socialism."