Top 15 Mao Zedong Quotes

The real war is within us. History is a symptom of our disease.

It's always darkest before it's totally black.

People who try to commit suicide — don't attempt to save them! . . . China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people.

"The food of the true revolutionary is the red pepper, And he who cannot endure red peppers is also unable to fight." - Otto Braun memoirs

It is absolutely necessary for educated young people to go to the countryside to be re-educated by the poor and lower-middle peasants. Cadres and other city people should be persuaded to send their sons and daughters who have finished junior or senior middle school, college, or university to the countryside. Let us mobilize. Comrades throughout the countryside should welcome them.

Except in the deserts, at every place of human habitation there is the left, the centre, and the right. This will continue to be so 10,000 years hence.

The Cultural Revolution can only be the emancipation of the masses by the masses.

The basic ideological programme of the great proletarian Cultural Revolution is 'to combat selfishness and criticize revisionism.'

The revolutionary red guards and revolutionary student organizations must form a grand alliance. As long as they are revolutionary mass organizations, they must form a great alliance according to revolutionary principles.

Democracy sometimes looks like an end in itself, but in fact it is merely a means to an end.

The peoples of the world must have courage, dare to fight, and fear no hardships. When the ones in front fall, the others behind must follow up. In this way, the world will belong to the people and all the demons will be eliminated.

The basic contradiction the great proletarian Cultural Revolution is trying to resolve is the one between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, between the proletarian and bourgeois roads. The main point of the movement is to struggle against the capitalist roaders in authority in the party.

Young people should be permitted to make mistakes. As long as their general orientation is correct, let them make minor mistakes. I believe that they can correct themselves in practical work.

A revolution depends on an inner core. This, the bourgeois faction in authority and the faction in authority which has committed mistakes know best; [their] peripheral organizations merely add fuel to the fire.

In any revolution, its internal causes are fundamental and its external ones are supplementary.