Here are some of my favorite lines from the book:

     "Guerrillas are incapable, after their experience of subversive warfare, of leading a normal life, incapable of taking part in a political system, even a revolutionary political system, even a system resulting from their conflict, because they have known those vague gods, those nomadic gods of Revolution. At the end of their short road there is nothing but death."

     "Do you believe in God?"
     "In the Devil rather."
     "And in revolution?"
     "It depends which. I only know that the world has got to change and that it isn't windbags or priests or bureaucrats who'll change it, but soldiers. Unfortunately regular armies are full of windbags, priests and bureaucrats."

      "The solitary adventure of a handful of men lost in the jungle is of no interest to anyone unless it is held up as an example, unless it is exalted or even condemned, by every means that modern technology has at is disposal for the dissemination of information. People must start talking about us. At all costs."

     "Priests, like professors and lawyers, need an audience. They seem to believe that talk is a substitute for action, whereas its real purpose is simply to emphasize and justify it."

     "Just like the members of the Only Party in Russia and in China today, like our own technocrats in the United States and in Europe, all those modern parasites who have taken the place of the priests and kings are likewise unable to leave the people in peace. They have to make laws and issue orders, draft rules and regulations, living in little cliques, seeing only what it suits them to see, and repeating, like the Mayan priests, that they are the only possible intermediaries between the people and the new gods. Because they know. But what do they know? The people, in their turn, are going to leave them in the lurch. Since they're incapable of doing anything, they'll die, strangled in their red tape."
     "The Mayas could at least escape into the jungle, said Olivier. "But what about us today? The world has been traveled from end to end, every island has been chartered and derricks sprout in the deserts."
     "There's always a means of escape, by emigrating within boundaries of one's own country without bothering anyone. You merely have to refuse to buy, sell, produce or earn money. You'll always find enough to eat, merely from the scraps of an over-rich, over-productive society. Free and without paying taxes. Taking to drugs or alcohol when you can in order to evade the incessant hammering of propaganda and publicity."

     "There's a place in history for each one of us. You haven't found yours, that's all. But stop boring us with the people and their aspirations. No one has ever bothered to find out what these aspirations really are, and still less to satisfy them. Least of all totalitarians of your sort. And that's what your little pals are dying of, as the Mayas and several others have died."

     "What does the life of one man matter? Beforehand, whenever I looked at the stars, I used to wonder all sorts of things about them: Who inhabited them? Where did they come from? How old were they?"
     "And now?"
     "All I ask of them is to guide me by night, on the march, when I've forgotten my compass."

     "Miners and guerrillas had withdrawn in disorder, abandoning their weapons, their wounded and dead comrades, and shouting treason, as happens in every army in the world each time it takes a beating."

     "I'll tell you what he had and you haven't got: significance. He was significant as a result of all he had undergone and experienced, the blows he had given and received, his remorse, disillusion and enthusiasm."

     "The more the world loses its senses, the more it indulges in pointless ritual."