Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates... Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service, should learn to think and act as a mass. The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study. What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two: melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land. The first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated. Man truly achieves his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity. If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine. There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us. A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive.

For me, the sea has always been a confidant, a friend absorbing all it is told and never revealing those secrets; always giving the best advice - its meaningful noises can be interpreted any way you choose. I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves. And then many things became very clear... we learned perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people. I know this, I see it printed in the night sky that I, eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or the trenches , will take my bloodstained weapon, and consumed with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands. I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.

Wrapped in a police blanket, I watched the rain and smoked one black cigarette after another... To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón [execution wall]. A petty concern with mere evidence is an antiquated and bourgeois feature of the captalist legal system. We are revolutionaries. We convict from a revolutionary passion. I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel... Be realistic, demand the impossible!

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. I would rather die standing up to live life on my knees. The revolution is made through human beings, but individuals must forge their revolutionary spirit day by day. I will fight with all the weapons within my reach rather than let myself be nailed to a cross or whatever. When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a “Newtonian” or of a biologist when asked if he is a “Pasteurian.”

Every person has the truth in his heart. No matter how complicated his circumstances, no matter how others look at him from the outside, and no matter how deep or shallow the truth dwells in his heart, once his heart is pieced with a crystal needle, the truth will gush forth like a geyser. I don't care if I fall as long as someone else picks up my gun and keeps on shooting. The revolution is not an apple that falls when ripe. You have to make it fall. It’s a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even sadder not to have enemies. One has to grow hard but without ever losing tenderness.

There is no other definition of socialism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man. Adherence to principles, and adherence to the individual, combine to make the Rebel Army an indivisible fist. We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it. Let the world change you and you can change the world. Every day People straighten up the hair, why not the heart?

The word that most perfectly describes the city of Cuzco is evocative. Intangible dust of another era settles on its streets, rising like the disturbed sediment of a muddy lake when you touch its bottom.