Great Throughts Treasury

"The prime role of a leader is to offer an example of courage and sacrifice."

"Religion is no longer the opium of the people but the vitamin pills of the feeble."

"Truly, more than removing the partition between vectors and values, we would have needed to talk about strengthening crisscrossed lacings: an intertwined kind of understanding that would de-ideologize 'ideologies,' desanctify sanctities, but also mentalize the material bases of systems of inscription, and psychoanalyze not souls but tools. That is, in one and the same gesture, make our mnemo-technic equipment intelligible as mentality and our mental equipment intelligible as technology."

"God, a born extremist, is the diplomat's worst enemy. Quite apart from the fact that His decrees are irrevocable, the Absolute will not allow anyone to relativize matters."

"C is when our environment (natural or cultural) has started to hurt us that it's notifies its existence, and we bare any more its weaknesses, the more we will have trouble. Thus does one discovers his tongue when, al abroad, we can not speak it - or that they had a homeland, when one is exiled. "

"Govern the minds of others, and not to the salvation of his soul, nor seek the true and the beautiful."

"As we know, the mountain proletarianizes the bourgeois and peasant elements, and the city can bourgeoisify the proletarians."

"Because a rural guerrilla movement requires a high degree of revolutionary maturity before it can become effective, self-defense has first to be organized in the large towns."

"Difference is not the opposite of harmony but its condition."

"Books were the sustenance of God. And His munitions."

"Homo innovative in that it stores."

"It is already clear that armed struggle is act in itself a panacea."

"That an intellectual, especially if he is a bourgeois, should speak of strategy before all else, is normal. Unfortunately, however, the right road, the only feasible one, sets out from tactical data, rising gradually toward the definition of strategy.... This slow climb from tactics to surrounding and corresponding strategy, along with the experience gained at all intermediate stages, is to some extent the history of the Cuban Revolution. It is a good methodological rule for practical apprenticeship."

"Paradoxically, it is almost impossible that a foco, the embryo of a popular army, should develop a militarist tendency; the tendency to believe that everything can be reduced to echar balas, to ?firing off,? and that only military success is important."

"Neither fetishize or stigmatize: replace Versus by Verso."

"The foco cannot constitute a strategy in itself without condemning itself to failure: it is a moment of struggle whose place can only be defined within an overall integrating strategy."

"We do not know if the doctors do not cause death instead of protecting us. If what we have on our plate will feed us or poison us. D or an obvious crisis of confidence - to technologies that we tend to disinvest after putting too much hope in them, adding techno-frustration moral disorientation."

"Whether or not to provide the popular forces with an armed detachment, organically independent of the civilian population, freed from the tasks of civil defense, and with the goal of winning political power ? such is the decisive criterion for distinguishing revolutionary phraseology from revolutionary theory."

"The necessary subordination of armed struggle to central political leadership must not be the cause of a division between the political and military movement."

"Under certain conditions, the political and the military are not separate, but form one organic whole, consisting of the people?s army, whose nucleus is the guerrilla army. The vanguard party can exist in the form of the guerrilla foco itself. The guerilla force is the party in embryo."