"But you alone cannot be a revolutionary; you will need a great organization, you will need a great army behind you.

"And the problem is one of the most significant things to be understood – that when you fight with somebody, slowly slowly, you become like your enemy. It's bound to be so; it follows a certain natural course. If you have to fight with somebody, you have to be like him; otherwise you will not be able to fight with him. Choose your enemy very carefully. Friends can be chosen without much care – they don't affect you so much – but enemies are very decisive.

"All revolutions fail because of the enemy. The enemy decides the whole thing. The czars of Russia decided the structure of the communist party; the czars decided how Joseph Stalin was going to be. And he proved a bigger czar than any other czar, and he proved even more terrible than Ivan the Terrible.

"Fighting with the czar, fighting with the imperialist structure of the czar, they learnt the whole strategy, all the tactics. By the time they came in power, they were perfectly groomed by the czar, by the enemy. By the time they came in power, they started behaving in the same way against their enemies as the czar had been behaving with them.

"This you can see all over the world again and again. Right now this is happening in Iran. The emperor is gone, and a far worse regime has taken his place. Khomeini is proving at least ten times more violent than the emperor himself. Khomeini has learnt the whole strategy from the emperor; his whole life he has suffered, struggled. That has been his school. Now, with a vengeance, he is proving himself to be a bigger emperor than the emperor himself. Now, every day, hundreds of people are being executed, killed.

"This has happened always: revolutions fail because they are reactions. Never be a revolutionary: be a rebel. A rebel is not against the past; the past is not even worth that. To be against it means to be focused on it; to be against it means you are paying too much attention to it."