These Che Guevara quotes will motivate you. Ernesto “Che” Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture. As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout South America and was radicalized by the poverty, hunger, and disease he witnessed.
His burgeoning desire to help overturn what he saw as the capitalist exploitation of Latin America by the United States prompted his involvement in Guatemala’s social reforms under President Jacobo Árbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified Guevara’s political ideology.
Best Che Guevara Quotes
- “Live your life not celebrating victories, but overcoming defeats.” ~ Che Guevara
- “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.” ~ Che Guevara
- “The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” ~ Che Guevara, Che Guevara quotes love
- “Democracy cannot consist solely of elections that are nearly always fictitious and managed by rich landowners and professional politicians.” ~ Che Guevara
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“It’s a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even sadder not to have enemies.” ~ Che Guevara
- “Be realistic, demand the impossible!” ~ Che Guevara
- “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.” ~ Che Guevara
- “To execute a man we don’t need proof of his guilt. We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him. It’s that simple.” ~ Che Guevara
- “To execute a man we don’t need proof of his guilt. We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him. It’s that simple.” ~ Che Guevara
- “Every day People straighten up the hair, why not the heart?” ~ Che Guevara
- “Above all, try always to be able to feel deeply any injustice committed against any person in any part of the world. It is the most beautiful quality of a revolutionary.” ~ Che Guevara
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“We have no right to believe that freedom can be won without struggle.” ~ Che Guevara
- “Let the world change you and you can change the world” ~ Che Guevara
- “To accomplish much you must first lose everything.” ~ Che Guevara
- “If you have the capacity to tremble with indignation every time that an injustice is committed in the world, then we are comrades.” ~ Che Guevara
- “Mexicans are a band of illiterate Indians.” ~ Che Guevara
- “We must bear in mind that imperialism is a world system, the last stage of capitalism-and it must be defeated in a world confrontation. The strategic end of this struggle should be the destruction of imperialism. Our share, the responsibility of the exploited and underdeveloped of the world, is to eliminate the foundations of imperialism: our oppressed nations, from where they extract capital, raw materials, technicians, and cheap labor, and to which they export new capital-instruments of domination-arms and all kinds of articles, thus submerging us in an absolute dependence.” ~ Che Guevara
- “Youth should learn to think and act as a mass. It is criminal to think as individuals!” ~ Che Guevara
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“I don’t care if I fall as long as someone else picks up my gun and keeps on shooting.” ~ Che Guevara
- “The negro has maintained his racial purity by his well known habit of
avoiding baths” ~ Che Guevara - “Silence is argument carried out by other means.” ~ Che Guevara
- “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.” ~ Che Guevara, Che Guevara quotes on education
- “Words without deeds are worthless.” ~ Che Guevara
- “Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men – how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?” ~ Che Guevara
- “One has to grow hard but without ever losing tenderness.” ~ Che Guevara
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“A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive.” ~ Che Guevara
- “Let’s be realistic. Let’s do the impossible!” ~ Che Guevara
- “Justice remains the tool of a few powerful interests; legal interpretations will continue to be made to suit the convenience of the oppressor powers.” ~ Che Guevara
- “The ***** is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.” ~ Che Guevara
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“We are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.” ~ Che Guevara
- “Democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy.” ~ Che Guevara
- “The best form of saying is doing.” ~ Che Guevara
- “The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind! Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination! If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba) we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City!” ~ Che Guevara
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“It’s not my fault if reality is Marxist” ~ Che Guevara
- “It is an illusion to think that the matter can be resolved through words.” ~ Che Guevara
- “There is no other definition of socialism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.” ~ Che Guevara, Che Guevara quotes on socialism
- “We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.” ~ Che Guevara
- “We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it, to his home, to his centers of entertainment: a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be, make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move. Then his moral fiber shall begin to decline, but we shall notice how the signs of decadence begin to disappear.” ~ Che Guevara
- “I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.” ~ 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.” ~ Che Guevara
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“Our youth must always be free, discussing and exchanging ideas concerned with what is happening throughout the entire world.” ~ Che Guevara
- “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.” ~ Che Guevara
- “Everyday you have to fight so that love for humanity can be transformed into concrete deeds, into acts that set an example, that mobilize.” ~ Che Guevara
- “Words that do not match deeds are not important.” ~ Che Guevara, Che Guevara quotes on deeds
- “The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition to predicting it (which would satisfy his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny.” ~ Che Guevara
- “My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood… Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands! With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!” ~ Che Guevara
- “I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.” ~ Che Guevara
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“A new era will dawn in Africa when the impoverished masses of a nation rise up to rescue their right to a decent life from the hands of the ruling oligarchies.” ~ Che Guevara
- “The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing, have seen their patch invaded by a different kind of slave: The Portuguese. the black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink; the European comes from a tradition of working and saving which follows him to this corner of America and drives him to get ahead.” ~ Che Guevara
- “Chess is an effective means to educate and train the human intellect.” ~ Che Guevara, Che Guevara quotes on chess
- “I will fight with all the weapons within my reach rather than let myself be nailed to a cross or whatever.” ~ Che Guevara
- “How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?” ~ Che Guevara
- “One must endure without losing tenderness.” ~ Che Guevara
- “One must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth in order to avoid dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticism, or an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.” ~ Che Guevara
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“A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón [execution wall].” ~ Che Guevara
- “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.” ~ Che Guevara, Che Guevara quotes about revolution
- “Many will call me an adventurer – and that I am, only one of a different sort: one of those who risks his skin to prove his truths.” ~ Che Guevara
- “We must do away with all newspapers. A revolution cannot be accomplished with freedom of the press.” ~ Che Guevara
- “If any person has a good word for the previous government that is good enough for me to have him shot.” ~ Che Guevara
- “The negro is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.” ~ Che Guevara
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“I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel.” ~ Che Guevara
- “The ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration: to see human beings liberated from their alienation” ~ Che Guevara
- “I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don’t get nailed to a cross or any other place.” ~ Che Guevara
- “The world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny.” ~ Che Guevara
- “I knew that the moment the great governing spirit strikes the blow to divide all humanity into just two opposing factions, I would be on the side of the common people.” ~ Che Guevara
