“I neglected my health, and I was reluctant to have medical check-ups. It was a fundamental mistake for a revolutionary, to the Venezuelan people and the international public opinion.”

“I can see why people find him [Hugo Chávez] charming. He's very ebullient, as they say. I've heard him make a speech, though, and he has a vice that's always very well worth noticing because it's always a bad sign: he doesn't know when to sit down. He's worse than Castro was. He won't shut up. Then he told me that he didn't think the United States landed on the moon and didn't believe in the existence of Osama bin Laden. He thought all of this was all a put-up job. He's a wacko.”

“We must be aware of consumerism! That's our tendency. It's the capitalistic curse that we were poisoned with. We should spend only what is necessary. How do you call the big cars, the latest ones? Hummer! Not a single dollar to import Hummers! What is that? What is that? What kind of revolution is this? One of Hummers? No way!”

“It makes one sad to see the sell-out of President Fox; really, it makes one sad. How sad that the president of a people like the Mexicans lets himself become the puppy dog of the empire.”

“I will be very sad and worried if the imperialist government was calling me a great democratic man.”

“I neglected my health, and I was reluctant to have medical check-ups. It was a fundamental mistake for a revolutionary, to the Venezuelan people and the international public opinion.”

“Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called 'Fear of Democracy'. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy.”

“Simon Bolivar, when history led him - and as Karl Marx said, men can make history, but only as far as history allows us to do so - when history took Bolivar and made him the leader of the independence process in Venezuela, he made that process revolutionary.”

“Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral.”

“I'm a Christian. I want the world of justice and equality. This is the only way to achieve peace.”

“Castro has been a teacher for me. A master. Not on ideology but on strategy.”