We want to be brothers and sisters. We want respect and equality. Simon Bolivar, our father, said a balanced world - a universe - a balanced universe in order to have peace and development.

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

Mutual respect! That's what it takes to be friends.

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.

The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war. It wants peace, but what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last hundred years in Latin America and in the world?

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.

There's been an open attack by the U.S. government, an immoral attack, to try and prevent Venezuela from being freely elected to a post in the Security Council. The imperium is afraid of truth, is afraid of independent voices. It calls us extremists, but they are the extremists.

I think the United States and the secretary of State should be concerned about the poverty in this country - people without health insurance. The United States should stop being the empire and be concerned about other countries. You've got to be more worried about your own people.

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.

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

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.