Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world. And the biggest gas reserves in this hemisphere, the eighth in the world. Venezuela was a U.S. oil colony. All of our oil was going up to the north, and the gas was being used by the U.S. and not by us. Now we are diversifying. Our oil is helping the poor.

Long live the Unity of Latin America.

I became a soldier, not because I had a military vocation initially, but because it was the only way that that young, poor-class child from the provinces could go to the center of the country: through baseball, which was my dream.

We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world.

Democracy is impossible in a capitalist system. Capitalism is the realm of injustice and a tyranny of the richest against the poorest.

We want to be brothers and sisters. We want respect and equality. Simon Bolivar, our father, said a balanced world - a universe - a balanced universe in order to have peace and development.

No part of the human community can live entirely on its own planet, with its own laws of motion and cut off from the rest of humanity.