The Words of Mao

(taken from Mao: the Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday)

"My student Mao Tse Tung said that... his clan...are mostly peasants, and it is easy for them to get rich." (from the diary of Professor Yang Chang-chi)

"I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one's action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others...People like me want to...satisfy our hearts to the full, and in so doing we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, they are all there only for me." (written when he was twenty-four years old)

"One or two beaten to death, no big deal." (quoted as saying in 1927)

"Why are you women so afraid of giving birth? Look at , giving birth for her is as easy as a hen dropping an egg." (a comment made by Mao after his second wife, Guiyuan, gave birth while on the Long March and made to abandon the child)

"Please, could the Soviet government satisfy our arms order for Korea in 1953, and our orders for arms industries." (a cable to Stalin, December 1952)

"...half of China may well have to die." (said during the great famine in the late fifties)

"Peking is not chaotic enough....Peking is too civilised." (said during the violence of the Cultural Revolution, 1966)

"I feel ill. Call the doctors." (Mao's last words)