I 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.

This country is heaven, in the spiritual sense of the word. And I say, we prefer to die in heaven than survive in hell.

If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for us to build those emplacements under the guise of something totally different and they would have never been discovered. The amazing thing was that they weren't discovered earlier. It was a question of carelessness, lack of foresight.

Today, the entire country is an immense University.

Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality, nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty.

I am a Marxist-Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.