“I think the government of Colombia doesn’t want peace….Colombia deserves a better president.” –about Alvaro Uribe
“The best way to end poverty is–you already know this–GIVING POWER TO THE POOR.”
“Let’s go after the terrorists, yes. Let’s find the terrorists. But not like this. You cannot fight terrorism with more terrorism!” –in reference to the war on Afghanistan
“Globalization is nothing new. We’ve had it for 500 years. Only now, it has computers.”
“There is no solution within capitalism, one must transcend capitalism. Nor is it about statism or state capitalism, which would be the same perversion of the Soviet Union, which was the cause of its fall. We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, as a project and a path, but a new socialism. Humanism, putting humans and not the machine ahead of everything, the human and not the state.”
“Nobody should be scared of socialism; it’s about equality.”
“If this revolution is to succeed, it is all-important that women acquire more power.”
“To God what is God’s. To Caesar what is Caesar’s. And to the people, what is the people’s.” –upon being restored to his seat by people power, April 14, 2002
“For me this is not a defeat and I don’t consider that this is a victory of the opposition. Here what exists is the maintenance of an opening towards a path for a new homeland. What they leave out of their invented accounts of crisis and of people easily defeated and sad, is that Chavez is still here for a while.” –about the constitutional reforms which were recently, and narrowly, defeated