Quotations from chairman Mao Tse-Tung

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INTRODUCTION
This book is probably the world's best seller today. In the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" convulsing Communist China, Peking has flooded the country with literally tens of millions of copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, in an effort to deify Mao and all of his works. Everywhere, young Chinese are carrying their little red copies of the book, memorizing Mao's sayings, and reciting them aloud in a fashion reminiscent of the way Chinese in past ages recited Confucius' sayings. Because the book contains the essence of Maoism as now officially defined, it has become sacred scripture for one-fifth of mankind.
One can legitimately ask: Even though millions of Chinese are now reading these extracts from Maoist dogma, why should Americans bother to do so? There are good reasons. For the foreseeable future, how to cope with China will be one of the most difficult problems for U. S. foreign policy. To deal with China successfully, we must clearly improve our understanding of the forces now at work there. And to achieve this improved understanding, some knowledge of the "thought of Mao Tse-tung" is essential. For these reasons, the non-Communist world cannot afford to ignore Mao's writings on subjects such as class struggle, the "mass line," and "people's war," as summarized in this volume.
In Mao's view, ideology is not simply abstract philosophy; it is a crucial "weapon" in the Communists' struggle to revolutionize China and the world. Many of the sayings quoted in this volume may sound, to some, like platitudinous Marxist-Leninist abstractions. But they are much more than that. They are sermons aimed at creating dedicated revolutionaries, and prescriptions designed to provide them with a practical guide on how to conduct "uninterrupted revolution."
The origins of most of Mao's thought can be traced to earlier Marxist-Leninist writings. But there is a distinctive —and in many respects unique—flavor to much of what Vissza