"No political event can be judged outside of the era and the circumstances in which it took place."

"Cuba came to be the last country to get rid of Spanish colonialism and the first to shake off the heinous imperialist tutelage."

"For revolutionary Cubans, to cooperate with other poor and exploited peoples has always been a political principle and a duty towards humanity."

"Social struggles have been taking place throughout millennia, since human beings, by resorting to wars, were able to take hold of a surplus production to satisfy the essential needs of life."

"A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past."

"Even in the United States, the enslavement of African descendants continued until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. That brutal form of slavery was abolished there hardly thirty years before it was abolished in Cuba."

"The United States tyrannizes and pillages the globalized world with its political, economic, technological, and military might."

"Sorry, I'm still a dialectical materialist."

"NATO's brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind."

"If people call me Christian, not from the standpoint of religion but from the standpoint of social vision, I declare that I am a Christian."

"Chavez, who came out of the ranks of the Venezuelan Army, is methodical and tireless. I have observed him over the course of 17 years, since his first visit to Cuba. He is an extremely humanitarian and law-abiding person; he has never taken revenge on anybody."

"Many things shall change in Cuba, but they shall change because of our efforts and despite the United States. Perhaps that empire shall crumble first."

"Every country must be absolutely free to adopt the type of economic, political and social system that it considers convenient."

"More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World."

"I can assure you that my first and foremost interest is my country."

"Never have we stolen the intelligences of other peoples. On the contrary, in Cuba we have trained tens of thousands of doctors and other top-level professionals, for free, in order to send them back to their own countries."

"Experience acquired in the heroic battle against Batista's tyranny showed that the enemy, no matter what his strength, could not defeat the Cuban people."

"I see Libya as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement and a sovereign State of the nearly 200 members of the United Nations."

"I see Libya as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement and a sovereign State of the nearly 200 members of the United Nations."

"Although we resolutely supported the armed struggle against Batista's tyranny, we were, on principle, opposed to any terrorist action that could cause the death of innocent people."

"The traditional stand adopted by the Cuban Revolution, which was always opposed to any action that could jeopardize the life of civilians, is well known."

"The last time I visited Qaddafi was in May of 2001, 15 years after Reagan attacked his rather modest residence where he took me to show me how it had been left."

"Oil has become the principal wealth in the hands of the great Yankee transnationals; through this energy source, they had an instrument that considerably expanded their political power in the world."

"Peoples do not defy repression and death, nor do they remain for nights on end protesting energetically, just because of merely formal matters."

"The United States is supplying the most modern and sophisticated weaponry to Israel to the tune of billions of dollars every year."

"Mubarak was oppressing and pillaging his own people. He was an enemy to the Palestinians and an accomplice of Israel, the sixth nuclear power on the planet, associated with the war-mongering NATO group."

"The United States never stopped conspiring against the Arab world, which holds the largest oil reserves on the planet."

"The death of Abdel Nasser on September 28, 1970, was an irreversible setback for Egypt."

"As we know, while our species remains alive, everybody has the sacred duty to be optimistic. Ethically, any other behaviour wouldn't be admissible."

"Our Revolution emerged where it was least expected by the empire, in a hemisphere where it was used to acting like an all-powerful master."

"We do not need the empire to give us anything."

"Some time ago, the United States was an English colony. If an Englishman were asked if the United States would be independent, he would have said no, that it would always be an English colony."

"The universities are available only to those who share my revolutionary beliefs."

"A revolution is not a bed of roses."

"No thieves, no traitors, no interventionists! This time the revolution is for real!"

"I am a Marxist Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life."

"The revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong."

"Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear."

"I have always fought for concrete facts, for justice."

"I never saw a contradiction between the ideas that sustain me and the ideas of that symbol, of that extraordinary figure, Jesus Christ."

"I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews."

"The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters."

"I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating... because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition."

"They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?"

"The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing - that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world - is what I wish for all."

"I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution."

"When at just 27 years old, Qaddafi, colonel in the Libyan army, inspired by his Egyptian colleague Abdel Nasser, overthrew King Idris I in 1969, he applied important revolutionary measures such as agrarian reform and the nationalization of oil."

"When the Revolution triumphed in 1959, our island was a true Yankee colony. The United States had duped and disarmed our Liberation Army. One couldn't speak of developed agriculture, but of immense plantations exploited on the base of manual and animal labour that in general used neither fertilizers nor machinery."

"The Revolution did not assume a socialist nature because of support from the U.S.S.R.; it was the other way around: support from the U.S.S.R. was produced by the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution. To such a degree, that when the U.S.S.R. disappears, Cuba keeps on being socialist."

"We teach our boys to firebomb villages, but we won't let them write fuck on the side of their planes because it's obscene."