2000s, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (2004)
Speech delivered at Luther College, Regina, Saskatchewan, March 16, 1973.
“Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
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.
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (The Little Red Book)
“This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.”
Source: Politics Among Nations (1948), p. 29 (1978 edition).
Context: The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power. Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene. … International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.
Source: Remainder (2005), Ch. 11.
I.F. Stone's Weekly (1963-01-21)
“Democracy brought to others through the barrel of a gun is not democracy.”
Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)
“You don't spread democracy through the barrel of a gun.”
As quoted in The Daily Show, (27 June 2006).
Variant: It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.
Source: Invisible Monsters
