Che Guevara Quotes

Revolution is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly and modestly.

A revolution is an idea that has found bayonets.

No people in the world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must being in blood, whatever may answer afterward.

My father believed in armed struggle.

The existing system will be quickest and most radically overthrown by the annihilation of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the enemies of the people must be set in motion.

The purpose of armed struggle is not simply to kill... its purpose is to reach a political goal.

Where a government has come to power through some sort of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not been exhausted.

When a people consider themselves compelled by circumstances or by oppression, to appeal to arms and resort to their natural rights, they necessarily submit their cause to the great tribunal of public opinion.

One cannot pretend that the sending of a dozen men to a country will lead to a revolution.

I believe in the armed struggle as the only solution for those people who fight to free themselves.

An armed uprising is inevitable and the time for it fully ripe.

The Congress decisively rejects terrorism, i.e., the system of individual political assassinations, as being a method of political struggle which is most inexpedient at the present time, diverting the best forces from the urgent and imperatively necessary work of organization and agitation, destroying contact between the revolutionaries and the masses of the revolutionary classes of the population, and spreading both among the revolutionaries themselves and the population in general utterly distorted ideas of the aims and methods of struggle against the autocracy.

Why does the guerrilla fighter fight? We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery.

Grasp Revolution

A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

Revolutions are never waged singing "We Shall Overcome." Revolutions are based upon bloodshed.

I witnessed a lot of violence, and I found myself asking the question: Do you ever use violence to try to bring about political change?

...no movement for social change has ever succeeded without 'the militarism component'....Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out

In my political philosophy I think that there sometimes is room for violence.

For my part I prefer fifty thousand rifles to five million votes.

Revolutionaries who come to power by force of arms usually have great crimes in their background. Leaders who survive campaigns by great powers to destroy them do not survive because they observe the niceties of law. Subversives who shape world events by covert action and violence work in shadows and detest the light of day.

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.

President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. I would say that the converse is true.

The power which establishes a state is violence; the power which maintains it is violence; the power which eventually overthrows it is violence.