“Despise the enemy strategically, but take him seriously tactically.”

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.

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.

Illiteracy does not impede the practice of democracy, as witnessed by the success of democracy in India despite the high illiteracy rate.

There is a lightening in our bones and wildfire in our spirits and we will find a way despite it all to survive and thrive.

Ghosts of the person you used to be are so proud of who you are, they live on inside you applauding you for living on despite your scars.

I once asked the most fabulous couple I know, Madonna and Guy Ritchie, how they kept things fresh despite having been married for almost seven months. ‘It’s a job, Al,’ Guy told me. ‘We work at it every day.’

Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.

This democracy… The elections in Iraq were held despite the American opposition.

I thought that despite all the wounds and all the pains it could cause I wanted to dream again, and love someone with all my heart.

Despite all the dire predictions made in 2001, the Afghans have given the international community, its aid workers and soldiers a large window of opportunity to repair the damage done by 25 years of war.