I enjoyed the discipline and solitariness of long-distance running, which allowed me to escape from the hurly-burly of school life.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both.

No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.

From the poorest of countries to the richest of nations, education is the key to moving forward in any society.

I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one's mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything.

I have never regarded any man as my superior, either in my life outside or inside prison.

At the meeting I argued that the state had given us no alternative to violence. I said it was wrong and immoral to subject our people to armed attacks by the state without offering them some kind of alternative. I mentioned again that people on their own had taken up arms. Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we saved lives by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people? If we did not take the lead now, I said, we would soon be latecomers and followers to a movement we did not control.