Silence is argument carried out by other means.

— Ernesto Che Guevara

Some give the impression they go on living only because it's a habit they cannot shake

— Ernesto Che Guevara

The best form of saying is being

— Ernesto Che Guevara

The psychological effects of the sun are strange: it had not yet appeared over the horizon, and we already felt comforted, just imagining the heat it would bring.

— Ernesto Che Guevara

The revolution is not an apple that falls when ripe. You have to make it fall.

— Ernesto Che Guevara

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the pardon [execution wall].

— Ernesto Che Guevara

We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.

— Ernesto Che Guevara

We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla is a social reformer, who takes up arms responding to the angry protests of the people against their oppressors, and who fights to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and poverty.

— Ernesto Che Guevara

When asked whether we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a “Newtonian” or of a biologist when asked if he is a “Pasteurize.

— Ernesto Che Guevara

When asked whether we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a “Newtonian” or of a biologist when asked if he is a “Pasteurize.” There are truths so evident, so much a part of the peoples’ knowledge, that it is now useless to debate them. One should be a “Marxist” with the same naturalness with which one is a “Newtonian” in physics or a “Pasteurize.” If new facts bring about new concepts, the latter will never take away that portion of truth possessed by those that have come before. Such is the case, for example, of “Einsteinian” relativity or of Planck’s quantum theory in relation to Newton’s discoveries. They take absolutely nothing away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it achieved new concepts of space. The learned Englishman was the necessary stepping-stone for that. Obviously, one can point to certain mistakes of Marx, as a thinker and as an investigator of the social doctrines and of the capitalist system in which he lived. We Latin Americans, for example, cannot agree with his interpretation of Bolivar, or with his and Engels’ analysis of the Mexicans, which accepted as fact certain theories of race or nationality that are unacceptable today. But the great men who discover brilliant truths live on despite their small faults and these faults serve only to show us they were human. That is to say, they were human beings who could make mistakes, even given the high level of consciousness achieved by these giants of human thought. This is why we recognize the essential truths of Marxism as part of humanity’s body of cultural and scientific knowledge. We accept it with the naturalness of something that requires no further argument.

— Ernesto Che Guevara