North Americans don’t understand… that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity.

I consider the fact that thousands of children die each day from starvation and a lack of medicine a crisis for humanity and a problem we must collectively attempt to solve.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

Cuba never had advisors in Vietnam. The military there knew very well how to conduct their war.

Meditation is to get insight, to get understanding and compassion, and when you have them, you are compelled to act.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.

What air is to the body, to feel understood is to the heart.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

Everything is clearer when you’re in love.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.

Even in the United States, the enslavement of African descendants continued until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. That brutal form of slavery was abolished there hardly thirty years before it was abolished in Cuba.

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‚why?‘ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‚why not?‘

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

I was kind of secretly hoping one of my kids would go out and make a million bucks. So when they put me in a home, at least I’ll have a window with a view.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me ‚understand‘ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

Never have we stolen the intelligences of other peoples. On the contrary, in Cuba we have trained tens of thousands of doctors and other top-level professionals, for free, in order to send them back to their own countries.

Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.

It is unnecessary to say that Fidel Castro possesses the high qualities of a fighter and statesman: our path, our struggle, and our triumph we owed to his vision.

The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick.

If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another.

Teach me to feel another’s woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

The infinite faith I have in people’s ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

The revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.