The guerrilla band is not to be considered inferior to the army against which it fights simply because it is inferior in fire power.
Che GuevaraRead
It is important to emphasize that guerrilla warfare is a war of the masses, a war of the people. The guerrilla band is an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the people. It draws its great force from the mass of the people themselves.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Guerrilla warfare relies on the support and participation of the general populace to succeed.
Che Guevara highlights the essence of guerrilla warfare as a movement rooted in the collective will and strength of the people. Rather than being a conventional battlefield strategy, it represents a grassroots uprising where the guerrilla fighters act as the spearhead, rallying the masses around a common cause to challenge oppressors and fight for liberation.
Themes
Guerrilla WarfarePeopleWar Of The MassesResistanceRevolution
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about social justice, one might quote Guevara to emphasize community-driven movements.
More from Che Guevara
All quotes βEvery day People straighten up the hair, why not the heart?
Che GuevaraRead
It is a revolution that came to power with its own army and on the ruins of the army of oppression.
Che GuevaraRead
The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination.
Che GuevaraRead
We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it, to his home, to his centers of entertainment: a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be, make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move. Then his moral fiber shall begin to decline, but we shall notice how the signs of decadence begin to disappear.
Che GuevaraRead
This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it to be. It is a glimpse of two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams.
Che GuevaraRead
Similar quotes
We sit in calm, airy, silent rooms opening upon sunlit and embowered lawns, not a sound except of summer and of husbandry disturbs the peace; but seven million men, any ten thousand of whom could have annihilated the ancient armies, are in ceaseless battle from the Alps to the Ocean.
Winston ChurchillRead
My father wanted to be a hero. He went to the Air Force Academy, was valedictorian, and then he found himself strafing villagers in Vietnam in a war he didn't want to be in and didn't understand. He was extremely conflicted about the line where he went from being the good guy to possibly being the bad guy.
Patty JenkinsRead
We come across thirty or so hurried graves with makeshift wooden markers. 'Private Edwards, E.', a number, and that was all. Fourteen days ago he was alive, thinking feeling, hoping... If war was a game of cards, I'd say someone was cheating.
Spike MilliganRead
The natural formation of the country is the soldier's best ally
Sun TzuRead
What one Predator drone pilot described of his experience fighting in the Iraq war while never leaving Nevada: 'You're going to war for 12 hours, shooting weapons at targets, directing kills on enemy combatants. Then you get in the car and you drive home, and within 20 minutes you're sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.'
P. W. SingerRead
The object of defense is preservation; and since it is easier to hold ground than to take it, defense is easier than attack. But defense has a passive purpose: preservation; and attack a positive one: conquest.... If defense is the stronger form of war, yet has a negative object, it follows that it should be used only so long as weakness compels, and be abandoned as soon as we are strong enough to pursue a positive object.
Carl Von ClausewitzRead