Sign in with your pod

Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina

Fidel Castro

104 quotes

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter from prison (19 December 1953)

• “The 26th of July Movement is not a tendency within the party, it is the revolutionary apparatus of Chibas's organization, a grass-roots movement, from which it emerged to fight against the dictator, while the Ortodoxo Party was lying helpless and divided. From then on, our revolutionary thesis has been the thesis of our party's masses; they had expressed their feelings unequivocally, from then on, the masses and the eladers have gone different ways.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1956 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Statement, Mexico, March 18th, 1956 as published in Carlos Franqui's Diary of the Cuban Revolution (1976), pp. 100.

• “The 26th of July Movement is the revolutionary organization of the humble, by the humble, for the humble. The 26th July Movement is the hope of redemption for the Cuban working class, who can hope for nothing from the political cliques; it is the hope of land for the peasants who live like pariahs in the country whose freedom their grandfathers won; it is the hope of going back home for the emigres who had to leave their country, here they could not live or work, and it is the hope of daily bread for the hungry and of justice for the forgotten.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1956 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Statement, Mexico, March 18th, 1956 as published in Carlos Franqui's Diary of the Cuban Revolution (1976), pp. 100-101.

• “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?”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech in Havana (8 January 1959)

• “I am not a dictator, and I do not think I will become one. I will not maintain power with a machine gun.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: I Won't Be a Dictator, interview with Ruth Lloyd (January 1959), printed in The Spokesman-Review (24 May 1959)

• “Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: I Won't Be a Dictator (1959)

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Fidel Castro after visiting the United Nations in New York (1959)

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Resignation announcement (17 July 1959)

• “The first duty of the revolutionaries is to tell the truth. Fooling the people, promoting illusions, always brings the worst consequences, and I believe that the people should be warned against excessive optimism. How did the Red Army win the war? By telling the truth. How did the dictatorship lose the war? By deceiving the soldiers.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Camp Columbia, Havana (Jan. 8th, 1959), Fidel Castro Reader, pp. 133

• “A revolution is not a trail of roses.... A revolution is a fight to the death between the future and the past.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech on the second anniversary of the triumph of the revolution (2 January 1961)

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On 16 April 1961, in a funeral oration in Vedado for victims of the air raids the day before, Fidel Castro referring to the January 1959 Cuban Revolution. Quoted in José Ramón Fernández. 2001. Playa Giron/Bay of Pigs: W…

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech on the anniversary of the Granma landing (2 December 1961)

• “I am a Marxist-Leninist, and I will be a Marxist-Leninist until the last days of my life.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech on the anniversary of the Granma landing (2 December 1961)

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (20 December 1961)

• “We believe that Marxism-Leninism is an incontestable truth.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech pronounced in Havana (13 March 1962)

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (19 April 1966)

• “Che brought the ideas of Marxism-Leninism to their freshest, purest, most revolutionary expression.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (18 October 1967)

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (12 January 1968)

• “Marx and Lenin represent precisely the two human personalities that will mark the passage between prehistory and the history of mankind.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (22 April 1970)

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (2 December 1971)

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (2 December 1971)

• “Marxism-Leninism is the ideology of the working class, the most complete political doctrine, the most accurate explanation of social and historical problems.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (7 June 1972)

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (26 July 1972)

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (22 December 1972)

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (12 September 1973)

• “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.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (8 May 1975)

• “Marxism-Leninism is ultimately deeply internationalist and, at the same time, deeply patriotic.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (2 December 1976)

• “Democratic Korea, its leaders and its people will always live in our feelings of revolutionaries, patriots and fighters for the triumph of socialism.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (11 March 1986)

• “Marxism-Leninism is the richest doctrine in ideas of justice, freedom, equality, fraternity among men.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (22 December 1991)

• “I propose the immediate launching of a nuclear strike on the United States. The Cuban people are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the destruction of imperialism and the victory of world revolution.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in "Castro Wanted a Nuclear Strike" in The New York Times (October 23, 1992)

• “The Alliance for Progress is an alliance between one millionaire and many beggars.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview with C. L. Sulzberger, The New York Times (November 7, 1964), p. 26.

• “Warfare is a means and not an end. Warfare is a tool of revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution! The important thing is the revolutionary cause, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary objectives, revolutionary sentiments, revolutionary virtues!”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech at the memorial service of Che Guevara (8 October 1967)

• “Scorn relations with the imperialist Government of the United States, a Government of genocide and decadence .. We have supported, we are supporting and we shall support revolutionary movements in Latin America. .. We feel very well outside the O.A.S., in fact better than inside. The O.A.S. is an organization that is bound to disappear.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: 19 April 1971 in Havana, according to 20 April 1971 New York Times article

• “You know my eyes are not very strong. So every day to make them stronger I force myself to look at the sun. I find it very hard. But do you know what I find harder? That is to look into the blue of your eyes.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Early in 1976, speaking to Margaret Trudeau, according to page 317 of Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-2000 by John English.

• “We have a theoretical concept of the Revolution which is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in With Fidel : A Portrait of Castro and Cuba (1976) by Frank Mankiewicz and Kirby Jones, p. 83

• “What was fascism in Italy, in Germany? The exaltation of racial prejudices. Instead of fighting racial prejudice, which is what a revolution does, fascism exalts prejudice and turns it into hatred.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech pronounced at the centenary of the Baragua protest (15 March 1978)

• “The economic management and planning system was not set up so that we can play at capitalism; and some people are shamefully playing at capitalism; we know this, we see it, and this must be set right.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Rectifying the Errors of the Cuban Revolution (1986)

• “It is really impressive what a filth system capitalism is, that can't guarantee its own people employment, nor health, nor adequate education; that cannot prevent youth from being corrupted by drugs, gamble, and all kind of vices.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (13 March 1991)

• “We cannot ignore Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the useless use of nuclear weapons, an absolutely unnecessary use that, in any case, could have been employed against some military facilities that fell, however, on civilian populations of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, to establish the era of the atomic terror in the world.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (25 November 1994)

• “Las ideas no necesitan ni de las armas, en la medida en que sean capaces de conquistar a las grandes masas. (Ideas do not need weapons, to the extent that they can convince the great masses.)”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech at the Conference on Foreign Debt in Latin America and the Caribbean (3 August 1985)

• “I never perceived a contradiction in the political revolutionary field between the ideas I maintained and the idea of that symbol, that extraordinary figure who had been so familiar to me since I began to reason.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On Jesus Christ, as quoted in Fidel and Religion (1985) by Frei Betto

• “Let us yield a bit. Let us grant socialism a few more years. Socialism is so obsolete, it is dying by itself.... Did I say socialism? I assure you on my honor this was not a mental slip. This was a slip of the tongue. Do not forget that. Capitalism—and I say it with such gusto—capitalism is so obsolete that it is dying by itself.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Comments on Latin American Debt (15 September 1985)

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

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Statement of 1991, during the fall of USSR.

• “Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the moral, nor the ethics, nor the will to solve the problems of poverty.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (26 July 1991)

• “Capitalism produces beasts, socialism produces men.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (22 December 1991)

• “As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech at the International Conference on Financing for Development (March 2002)

• “Ho Chi Minh was, is and will be an eternal example.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech (6 March 2003)

• “This country ... abounds in that Cuba is a heaven in the spiritual sense of the word, and we prefer to die in heaven than serve in hell.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech at the First World Congress on Literacy (2 February 2005) paraphrasing a line in John Milton's Paradise Lost; quoted in Granma

• “Capitalism is a system based on blind, destructive and tyrannical laws imposed on the human species.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Writings (10 November 2007)

• “When I was a young boy, my father taught me that to be a good Catholic, I had to confess at church if I ever had impure thoughts about a girl. That very evening, I had to rush to confess my sin. And the next night, and the next. After a week, I decided religion wasn't for me.”

  Fidel Castro (1926–2016) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in The Atheist's Bible (2007) edited by Joan Konner, p. 62

More