“Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”

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.

All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.

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.

Swollen in head, weak in legs, sharp in tongue but empty in belly.

We shall heal our wounds, collect our dead and continue fighting.

To read too many books is harmful.

I voted for you during your last election.

Never let the estate decrease in your hands. It is only by such resolutions as that that English noblemen and English gentlemen can preserve their country. I cannot bear to see property changing hands.

Every free day, every weekend, I am in a recording session. I’m very lucky to have such supportive people around me.

It was such a beautiful day I decided to stay in bed.

It will be proved that it extends everywhere, most fluid and simple, and nowhere presents obstacles as was formerly held, the circuits of the Planets being wholly free and without the labour and whirling round of any real spheres at all, being divinely governed under a given law.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

There is no such thing as a politically correct war.

Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.