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.

Despise the enemy strategically, but take him seriously tactically.

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

I voted for you during your last election.

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.

People like me sound like a lot of big cannons.

Learn from the masses, and then teach them.

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

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

Enable every woman who can work to take her place on the labour front, under the principle of equal pay for equal work.

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

In time of difficulties, we must not lose sight of our achievements.

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

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

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

Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.

All reactionaries are paper tigers.

We think too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.

In waking a tiger, use a long stick.

Political work is the life-blood of all economic work.

Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.

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.

Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it.

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.

Women hold up half the sky.

The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.

The differences between friends cannot but reinforce their friendship.

There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants.

Once all struggle is grasped, miracles are possible.

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

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

It was not simply out of a spirit of contradiction that I exposed a light source to magnetic forces. The idea came to me during an investigation of the effect discovered by Kerr on light reflected by magnetic mirrors.

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights. Dr. King did not stir us to move for our civil rights to have them taken away in these kinds of fashions.

Darwinism as presented by Darwin contradicted idealistic philosophy, and this contradiction grew deeper with the development of its materialist teaching.

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching.

Say to all small and great, and that often, that fully, quickly and willingly, without grumbling and contradiction, they do all your commands that are not against God.

We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore.

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.