“I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics...that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline.”
― Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics

“But after living in Communist China for the past seventeen years, I knew that such a society was only a dream because those who seized power would invariably become the new ruling class. They would have the power to control the people’s lives and bend the people’s will. Because they controlled the production and distribution of goods and services in the name of the state, they would also enjoy material luxuries beyond the reach of the common people. In Communist China, details of the private lives of the leaders were guarded as state secrets. But every Chinese knew that the Party leaders lived in spacious mansions with many servants, obtained their provisions from special shops where luxury goods were made available to their household at nominal prices, and send their children in chauffeur-driven cars to exclusive schools to be taught by specially selected teachers. Even though every Chinese knew how these leaders lived, no one dared to talk about it. If we had to pass by a special shop for the military or high officials, we carefully looked the other way to avoid giving the impression we knew it was there.”
― Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai

“The first thing totalitarian leaders do is make sure their voices are the only ones left.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“this is the way of the Communists - using good words to do bad things”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China

“With its sign system, totalitarianism tries to imprint its logic on reality, to permanently link it to the real world. Importantly, the assignment of signs and stigmas is usually the first step in the process of destruction.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Jung Chang said that Mao ruled by getting people to hate each other: ‘Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred.”
― Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

“China during the Mao era was a poor country, but it had a strong public health network that provided free immunizations to its citizens. That was where I came in. In those days there were no disposable needles and syringes; we had to reuse ours again and again. Sterilization too was primitive: The needles and syringes would be washed, wrapped separately in gauze, and placed in aluminum lunch boxes laid in a huge wok on top of a briquette stove. Water was added to the wok, and the needles and syringes were then steamed for two hours, as you would steam buns.

On my first day of giving injections I went to a factory. The workers rolled up their sleeves and waited in line, baring their arms to me one after another – and offering up a tiny piece of red flesh, too. Because the needles had been used multiple times, almost every one of them had a barbed tip. You could stick a needle into someone’s arm easily enough, but when you extracted it, you would pull out a tiny piece of flesh along with it. For the workers the pain was bearable, although they would grit their teeth or perhaps let out a groan or two. I paid them no mind, for the workers had had to put up with barbed needles year after year and should be used to it by now, I thought. But the next day, when I went to a kindergarten to give shot to children from the ages of three through six, it was a difference story. Every last one of them burst out weeping and wailing. Because their skin was so tender, the needles would snag bigger shreds of flesh than they had from the workers, and the children’s wounds bled more profusely. I still remember how the children were all sobbing uncontrollably; the ones who had yet to be inoculated were crying even louder than those who had already had their shots. The pain the children saw others suffering, it seemed to me, affected them even more intensely than the pain they themselves experienced, because it made their fear all the more acute.

That scene left me shocked and shaken. When I got back to the hospital, I did not clean the instruments right away. Instead, I got hold of a grindstone and ground all the needles until they were completely straight and the points were sharp. But these old needles were so prone to metal fatigue that after two or three more uses they would acquire barbs again, so grinding the needles became a regular part of my routine, and the more I sharpened, the shorter they got. That summer it was always dark by the time I left the hospital, with fingers blistered by my labors at the grindstone.

Later, whenever I recalled this episode, I was guilt-stricken that I’d had to see the children’s reaction to realize how much the factory workers must have suffered. If, before I had given shots to others, I had pricked my own arm with a barbed needle and pulled out a blood-stained shred of my own flesh, then I would have known how painful it was long before I heard the children’s wails.

This remorse left a profound mark, and it has stayed with me through all my years as an author. It is when the suffering of others becomes part of my own experience that I truly know what it is to live and what it is to write. Nothing in the world, perhaps, is so likely to forge a connection between people as pain, because the connection that comes from that source comes from deep in the heart. So when in this book I write of China’s pain, I am registering my pain too, because China’s pain is mine.”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“Wherever battles are waged there are casualties, and death is a common occurrence. But what is closest to our hearts is the best interest of the people and the suffering of the vast majority, and when we die for the people, it is an honorable death. Nevertheless we should do our best to avoid unnecessary casualties.
Mao Zedong, 1944”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“In any case, if we are to understand the meaning of Maoist reason and a critique of its boundaries, we must also learn to think Maoism in its totality: which means to also think its distance from pre-Maoist Leninism and pre-Leninist Marxism, and which further means to think what makes Maoism the highest stage of revolutionary science - by what rationale can we call it a stage, what makes the rocess of which it is a part scientific, and what scientific thinking means for Maoists interested in developing revolutionary theory.”
― J. Moufawad-Paul, Critique of Maoist Reason

“From the point of view of the history of Marxism, Maoist ideology is noteworthy not because Mao 'developed' anything but because it illustrates the unlimited flexibility of any doctrine once it becomes historically influential.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“Experimentation on humans is the prototypical activity of totalitarianism. It is the ultimate submission of reality to the pseudoscientific ideological fiction.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Part of the Maoist project was the deliberate construction of a new moral identity. To do this it was necessary to destroy people’s previous sense of who they were and to make sure there was no room for it grow back.”
― Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

“I couldn't make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those had little got less. The world ran on this law and only on this.”
― Neel Mukherjee

“A former Red Guard relates, “I believe many little girls and boys of my generation dreamed of being a geological prospector… Propaganda for recruiting young people to work in this area was very effective. When my neighbor’s daughter was accepted by the geology department of a prestigious university, we all envied her for her future prospects of an adventurous life.”
― Sigrid Schmalzer, Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism

“I was enticed like a fly to a pot of honey by something reminiscent of a religious cult offering salvation. We were not urged to commit collective suicide, because the Day of Judgment was nigh, but to give up our individuality for the benefit of a collective intoxication, at the heart of which was a Little Red Book that had replaced all other forms of enlightenment. It contained all wisdom, the answers to all questions, expressions of all the social and political visions the world needed in order to progress from its present state and install once and for all paradise on earth, rather than a paradise in some remote kingdom in the sky. But what we didn’t even begin to understand was that the sayings comprised living words. They were not inscribed in stone. They described reality. We read the sayings without interpreting them. As if the Little Red Book was a dead catechism, a revolutionary liturgy.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“At Hongguang Commune, a roadside area of more than 2,000 mu was cleared of more than 180 dwellings. At least 12,000 homes were dismantled throughout the county. Unrelated families were obliged to share quarters, sometimes with domestic fowl. Cadres burst into homes without notice, tossed out belongings, and reduced a house to rubble in an instant. Commune members returning from deployment elsewhere wept upon finding their homes, wives, and children gone. Some families relocated seven times in a year. Cadres ransacked homes, often snatching desirable goods. Some commune members retaliated by hiding snakes in their rice jars.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

“This new idea that the movement has to be completely transparent to everyone as a principle, especially to people whom we don't trust, to me this is an unconscious influence from liberal culture. That no one should be held back from knowing everything that any part of the movement is up to? This is an idea that has come about from the current distortion of the left as part of the cultural zone of "play nice" middle-class reformism. As though bourgeois civil liberties mindsets developed in part by interaction with cops and courts should define how we in the struggle relate and work with each other. As though we aren't outlaws and rebels. This didn't exist in earlier eras when the movement was primarily made up of oppressed working people fighting to survive, guarded in their trust, and for good reasons. 'Necessity know no laws'.”
― J. Sakai, Basic Politics of Movement Security

“Measured by European standards the ideological documents of Maoism, and especially the theoretical writings of Mao himself, appear in fact extremely primitive and clumsy, sometimes even childish; in comparison, even Stalin gives the impression of a powerful theorist.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“Maoism in its final shape is a radical peasant Utopia in which Marxist phraseology is much in evidence but whose dominant values seem completely alien to Marxism.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“Marx's projected emancipating socialist "Kingdom of Freedom" - freedom not only from coercion but from any sort of necessity- turned out to be totalitarian and among the most violently oppressive regimes ever.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“...when he witnessed his first struggle (against another prisoner) - during which the cell chief urged everyone to "help" the man under fire - he thought to himself:

"So this is the way of the Communists - using good words to do bad things”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China

“He summed up his admiration-tinged condemnation of the Communists in the simple statement: "They lie so truly.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China

“Revolutionary Islam is linked to the Koran, to be sure, just as Stalinism and Maoism were linked to Das Kapital, but to explain the horrors of China's man-made famines or the Soviet gulag solely by invoking the writings of Karl Marx would be to miss the main point. Messianic violence can attach itself to any creed.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“Mao Tsetung's grasp of the future, his vision of man's true role on earth, has given him a place as a world figure. His creative genius has come from his constant return to the people, resisting all attempts to elevate himself above them. Much has been said about the "personality cult"; I have seen true, genuine love and admiration from the ordinary people of China for Mao Tsetung. The personality cult evolved round him by city bureaucrats he has done his best to put down, withdrawing himself as a person, giving to the people all homage for the Revolution. It is in this spirit, not elevating Mao as a genius, but showing him as a man, in a constant search for truth, for reality, that this book has been written.”
― Han Suyin