Mao Zedong Quotes

A socialist is someone who has read Lenin and Marx. An anti-socialist is someone who understands Lenin and Marx.

Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized.

The socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system …. However much the reactionaries try to hold back the wheel of history, sooner or later revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph.

Communists are frustrated capitalists.

To overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie and to establish the power of the proletariat in one country still does not signify the full victory of Socialism.

It is the basic principle of Marxism that any attempt to reconcile capital and labor so that they both co-operate in peace and prosperity is a betrayal of communism.

The [Communist] Party has one objective: the creation of a socialist economy; and one means: the utilization of the class struggle.

Just as feudalism was an advance over slavery, and capitalism was the next step after feudalism, socialism is the next step after capitalism...........Socialism in America will come through the ballot box.

There are a few people, but a diminishing number, who still believe that Marxism, as an economic system, off era a coherent alternative to capitalism, and socialism has, indeed, triumphed in one country.

I'm a Marxist.

There are Marxists and there are people that are socialists. But the label of Marxist takes on a whole new meaning. Even socialist for a while took on a whole new meaning.

I can't understand Karl Marx, so how can I be a Communist?

[Marx's theories] gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.

His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well.

Socialist democracy is not a luxury but an absolute, essential necessity for overthrowing capitalism and building socialism.

There can be no immaculate conception of socialism.

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.

A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. Where is the Party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.

Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation.

For [Karl] Marx what counts is man. He is the root of everything;while for capitalism, the aim are things, profit, and man is only a means to gain them. As an authentically religious individual, Marx could not be other than against "religion".

Capitalism Survive?—I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society.

It is a very good thing, and a significant one too, to exterminate the bourgeoisie and capitalism in China.

I would say I was still a Marxist - which is not to be confused with being a Communist. Despite its flaws, Marxism still seems to explain the material world better than anything else.