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 CastroOne of the greatest benefits of the revolution is that even our prostitutes are college graduates.
Fidel CastroThere is nothing more agreeable than having a place where one can throw on the floor as many cigar butts as one pleases without the subconscious fear of a maid who is waiting like a sentinel to place an ashtray where the ashes are going to fall.
Fidel CastroI find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating... because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.
Fidel CastroWere Kennedy not a millionaire, illiterate and ignorant, then he would obviously understand that you cannot revolt against the peasants.
Fidel CastroIf people call me Christian, not from the standpoint of religion but from the standpoint of social vision, I declare that I am a Christian.
Fidel CastroMy idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn't work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.
Fidel CastroNowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet.
Fidel CastroThe Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.
Fidel CastroIf religious feeling is put in opposition to social change, then it does become an opium, but if it is joined to the struggle for social change then it is a wonderful medicine.
Fidel CastroThis country is heaven, in the spiritual sense of the word. And I say, we prefer to die in heaven than survive in hell.
Fidel CastroWe need a Nuremberg to put on trial the economic order that they have imposed on us, that every three years kills more men, women and children by hunger and preventable or curable diseases than the death toll in six years of the second world war.
Fidel CastroYou Americans keep saying that Cuba is ninety miles from the United States. I say that the United States is ninety miles from Cuba and for us, that is worse.
Fidel CastroI can assure you that my first and foremost interest is my country. This is not a personal matter. We are not people driven by a wish to be in the government since [it] is for us the least attractive work, even though we are politicians.
Fidel CastroThe revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.
Fidel CastroI was a man who was lucky enough to have discovered a political theory, a man who was caught up in the whirlpool of Cuba's political crisis...; discovering Marxism...was like finding a map in the forest.
Fidel CastroA revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.
Fidel CastroThe 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 CastroThe first thing dictators do is finish free press, to establish censorship. There is no doubt that a free press is the first enemy of dictatorship.
Fidel CastroI 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 CastroCapitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality, nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty.
Fidel CastroWith what moral authority can they speak of human rights - the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this - the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings.
Fidel CastroMore than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World.
Fidel CastroDemocracy's my idea. I do not agree with communists, my acts prove. Free press in Cuba - free ideas, freedom religion belief.
Fidel CastroThe percentage of mentally disturbed people in the United States is very high. From the time the American gets up in the morning, he feels as if someone is trying to influence his will in some way: he is a person with a thousand pressures. The Americans live under a great strain ... and have great feelings of frustration.
Fidel CastroI am someone who's been in politics for 43 years and I know what I'm doing and what I should do. Have no doubt that I know how to tell the truth and to do so elegantly.
Fidel CastroIn the Third World, there are 1.3 billion poor people. In other words, one out of every three inhabitants lives in poverty.
Fidel CastroWarfare 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 CastroA large percentage of those living in developed societies are told what brand of soda they should drink, what cigarettes they should smoke, what clothes and shoes they should wear, what they should eat and what brand of food they should buy. Their political ideas are supplied in the same way. Every year a trillion dollars is spent on advertising.
Fidel CastroI am not a dictator, and I do not think I will become one. I will not maintain power with a machine gun.
Fidel CastroSovereignty is not negotiated in exchange for anything; to maintain the achievements of the revolution does not depend on a foreign power.
Fidel Castro