“Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

—  Mao Zedong

Chapter 5 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch05.htm, originally published in Problems of War and Strategy (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224. <br class="br">Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (The Little Red Book)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." by Mao Zedong?
Mao Zedong photo
Mao Zedong181
Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of… 1893–1976

Related quotes

Hunter S. Thompson photo

“All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.”

Hunter S. Thompson book Kingdom of Fear

2000s, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (2004)

Tommy Douglas photo

“To accept the principal that "all power proceeds from the barrel of a gun" is to accept a society which will be dominated by those with the biggest guns.”

Tommy Douglas (1904–1986) Scottish-born Canadian politician

Speech delivered at Luther College, Regina, Saskatchewan, March 16, 1973.

Tzvetan Todorov photo

“Democracy brought to others through the barrel of a gun is not democracy.”

Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017) Bulgarian historian, philosopher, structuralist literary critic, sociologist and essayist

Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)

Helen Thomas photo

“You don't spread democracy through the barrel of a gun.”

Helen Thomas (1920–2013) American author and journalist

As quoted in The Daily Show, (27 June 2006).

Charles Stross photo

“Worlds with a single planetary government aren’t meant to be peaceful and open and into civil rights! When I see a planet with just one government, I look for the mass graves. It’s some kind of natural law or something—world governments grow out of the barrel of a gun.”

Charles Stross book Iron Sunrise

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 10, “Murder by Numbers” (pp. 160-161)

Charles Krauthammer photo

“We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics – in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations – is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2011, Are we alone in the universe? (2011)

Chuck Palahniuk photo

“With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Alex Jones photo

“Hitler took the guns. Stalin took the guns. Mao took the guns. You know, 'political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' And then if another crazy person everybody knew was going to attack goes and kills some people and then I'm to blame and all gun owners are to blame? Well, if somebody runs somebody with a car are they all to blame? Or somebody with a baseball bat? This is common sense and you've got a young high school senior teenager cussing to get attention to pull a stunt but none of use are supposed to talk about it because if you respond to him calling you a piece of this or a piece of that or his cohorts calling Dana Loesch a murderer and people are chanting 'burn her', well then you're a bully. That's why CNN wants to use this to kill the First Amendment, not just the Second Amendment! You have YouTube banning videos with guns, with citizens having guns or showing guns, but Hollywood and the video game makers can show all the guns they want. This is an incredibly discriminatory system!”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

&quot;Antigun Activist David Hogg Attacks Infowars For Gay Frogs&quot; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN4pTxI12Hc&amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;t=19m59s, The Alex Jones Show, March 2018.

Isabel II do Reino Unido photo

“The right to change the government by the ballot box and not the barrel of a gun; perhaps the best definition of a democracy.”

Isabel II do Reino Unido (1926–2022) queen of the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and head of the Commonwealth of Nations

During a speech to President Gerald Ford celebrating the 200th anniversary of American independence. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Q

Stanisław Lem photo

“The declining intellectual quality of political leadership is the result of the growing complexity of the world. Since no one, be he endowed with the highest wisdom, can grasp it in its entirety, it is those who are least bothered by this who strive for power.”

Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) Polish science fiction author

One Human Minute (1986)
Context: The book does not contain “everything about the human being,” because that is impossible. The largest libraries in the world do not contain “everything.” The quantity of anthropological data discovered by scientists now exceeds any individual’s ability to assimilate it. The division of labor, including intellectual labor, begun thirty thousand years ago in the Paleolithic, has become an irreversible phenomenon, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A politician is, after all, a kind of expert, if self-styled. Even the fact that competent experts must serve under politicians of mediocre intelligence and little foresight is a problem that we are stuck with, because the experts themselves cannot agree on any major world issue. A logocracy of quarreling experts might be no better than the rule of the mediocrities to which we are subject. The declining intellectual quality of political leadership is the result of the growing complexity of the world. Since no one, be he endowed with the highest wisdom, can grasp it in its entirety, it is those who are least bothered by this who strive for power.

Related topics