Jose Marti

We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it.

Like bones to the human body, the axle to the wheel, the wing to the bird, and the air to the wing, so is liberty the essence of life. Whatever is done without it is imperfect.

Men have no special right because they belong to one race or another: the word man defines all rights.

Other famous men, those of much talk and few deeds, soon evaporate. Action is the dignity of greatness.

Man is a living duty, a depository of powers that he must not leave in a brute state. Man is a wing.

Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them.

Just as he who gives his life to serve a great idea is admirable, he who avails himself of a great idea to serve his personal hopes of glory and power is abominable, even if he too risks his life.

Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas.

Books console us, calm us, prepare us, enrich us and redeem us.

To change masters is not to be free.

Man loves liberty, even if he does not know that he loves it. He is driven by it and flees from where it does not exist.

If I survive, I will spend my whole life at the oven door seeing that no one is denied bread and, so as to give a lesson of charity, especially those who did not bring flour.

Talent is a gift that brings with it an obligation to serve the world, and not ourselves, for it is not of our making.

It is a sin not to do what one is capable of doing.

The vote is a trust more delicate than any other, for it involves not just the interests of the voter, but his life, honor and future as well.

He who receives money in trust to administer for the benefit of its owner, and uses it either for his own interest or against the wishes of its rightful owner, is a thief.

In this world, there must be a certain degree of honor just as there must be a certain amount of light. When there are many men without honor, there will always be some others who bear in themselves the honor of many men.

An insatiable appetite for glory leads to sacrifice and death, but innate instinct leads to self-preservation and life.

The first duty of a man is to think for himself

Freedoms, like privileges, prevail or are imperiled together You cannot harm or strive to achieve one without harming or furthering all.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.