“All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.”

In general, any form of exercise, if pursued continuously, will help train us in perseverance. Long-distance running is particularly good training in perseverance.

Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated.

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.

Passivity is fatal to us. Our goal is to make the enemy passive.

Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.

Let a hundred flowers bloom.

Despise the enemy strategically, but take him seriously tactically.

The differences between friends cannot but reinforce their friendship.

The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the United States reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t.

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself.

People like me sound like a lot of big cannons.

In waking a tiger, use a long stick.

Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive one; it is man and not materials that counts.