I knew the Classics, but disliked them. What I enjoyed were the romanc — Mao Zedong

"In his enhanced identification with revolutionary youth, Mao no longer found the Partys standard" from the top down" approach to mass mobilization acceptable, and in spontaneously rebuking Liu and Deng and ordering the work teams withdrawn, he authorized a momentous departure from previous traditions of Party-mass linkage. Having ventured this innovation, however, he found it impossible either to allow the rebels to consummate their victory or to permit the entire experiment in spontaneous mobilization to be negated. Instead, from 1968 through 1976 he vacillated, sometimes permitting repression of the "revolutionary masses," sometimes kicking over the traces and permitting the masses to rise in relatively untrammeled anarchy (up to a point); as a result, mass mobilization became devalued either as a mechanism for elite implementation of policy or for the purpose of popular monitoring of deviant elites. Similarly, it was his prescient recognition of the problem of his own aging and debility that led Mao to attempt to designate his own heir apparent well in advance and to encourage the rise of revolutionary successors in a generational sense, but having undertaken such preparations he found them in direct conflict with his own fierce will to live, and thus repeatedly reversed them. On the issues of both mobilization and succession, we have argued that although part of the reason for Maos oscillatory tendencies has to do with the constraints of a complex political reality, basically he was afflicted by his own crippling ambivalence. The result was an unusually protracted and debilitating crisis of succession."

"There is more of Dewey than of Marx in all this."

"In Mao a politician’s grasp of the historical moment was coupled with a poet’s whimsy, and it was often through some improvised flourish that he would unveil his program. When the Communist Party Central Committee and the top brass in Beijing tried to clamp down on popular protests, Mao did not use his supreme authority as party chairman to set his colleagues straight. Instead, he employed the very same approach as the masses by writing a big-character poster of his own, entitled “Bombard the Headquarters,” protesting that “some leading comrades” had adopted “the reactionary stand of the bourgeoisie … encircling and suppressing revolutionaries” and “stifling opinions different from their own.” You can imagine people’s reaction: what can it mean when the great leader Chairman Mao has gone so far as to write a big-character poster? It can mean only one thing—that Chairman Mao is in the same boat as ordinary people like themselves! No wonder, then, that the great proletarian Cultural Revolution soon engulfed China with the speed of an unquenchable wildfire. Historically, emperors have always cut the kind of figure and spoken the kind of language expected of an emperor, no matter how exalted or how humble their origins. Mao was the only exception. After he became leader, he often acted quite out of keeping with accepted norms, taking his comrades in the Communist Party leadership completely by surprise. Mao understood very well how to whip the masses into a frenzy, and by appearing on the Gate of Heavenly Peace in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution and greeting fanatical “revolutionary students” and “revolutionary masses” there, he impelled the high tide to ever greater heights."

"凡是敵人反對的，我們就要擁護；凡是敵人擁護的，我們就要反對。 (Fánshì dírén fǎnduì de, wǒmen jiù yào yǒnghù; fánshì dírén yǒnghù de, wǒmen jiù yào fǎnduì.)"

"The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people. it looks terrible but in fact it isnt. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people--not by one of two new types of weapon."

"由于中国民族资产阶级是殖民地半殖民地国家的资产阶级，是受帝国主义压迫的，所以，虽然处在帝国主义时代，他们也还是在一定时期中和一定程度上，保存着反对外国帝国主义和反对本国官僚军阀政府（这后者，例如在辛亥革命时期和北伐战争时期）的革命性，可以同无产阶级、小资产阶级联合起来，反对它们所愿意反对的敌人。这是中国资产阶级和旧俄帝国的资产阶级的不同之点。在旧俄帝国，因为它已经是一个军事封建的帝国主义，是侵略别人的，所以俄国的资产阶级没有什么革命性。在那里，无产阶级的任务，是反对资产阶级，而不是联合它。在中国，因为它是殖民地半殖民地，是被人侵略的，所以中国民族资产阶级还有在一定时期中和一定程度上的革命性。在这里，无产阶级的任务，在于不忽视民族资产阶级的这种革命性，而和他们建立反帝国主义和反官僚军阀政府的统一战线。 但同时，也即是由于他们是殖民地半殖民地的资产阶级，他们在经济上和政治上是异常软弱的，他们又保存了另一种性质，即对于革命敌人的妥协性。中国的民族资产阶级，即使在革命时，也不愿意同帝国主义完全分裂，并且他们同农村中的地租剥削有密切联系，因此，他们就不愿和不能彻底推翻帝国主义，更加不愿和更加不能彻底推翻封建势力。这样，中国资产阶级民主革命的两个基本问题，两大基本任务，中国民族资产阶级都不能解决。至于中国的大资产阶级，以国民党为代表，在一九二七年至一九三七年这一个长的时期内，一直是投入帝国主义的怀抱，并和封建势力结成同盟，反对革命人民的。中国的民族资产阶级也曾在一九二七年及其以后的一个时期内一度附和过反革命。在抗日战争中，大资产阶级的一部分，以汪精卫为代表，又已投降敌人，表示了大资产阶级的新的叛变。这又是中国资产阶级同历史上欧美各国的资产阶级特别是法国的资产阶级的不同之点。在欧美各国，特别在法国，当它们还在革命时代，那里的资产阶级革命是比较彻底的；在中国，资产阶级则连这点彻底性都没有。"

"At one point a heated discussion arose over the possible interpretation of Lolita as a grandiose metaphor of the classic Europeans hopeless love for young, seductive, barbaric America. In his afterword to the novel Nabokov himself mentions this as the naive theory of one of the publishers who turned the book down. And although there cant be the slightest doubt that Nabokov did not mean to limit Lolita to that interpretation, there is no reason to exclude it as one of the novels many dimensions. The point, I felt, became obvious when one drew the line between Lolita as a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography and Lolita as a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century."

"Lovely food, for rabbits, that is."

"One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved."

"[explaining to Ernie how April apologized to him] She just showed up at the factory, took off her coat, and begged me to take her. We made love in a way that Ive only ever seen in nature films."

"Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised."

"He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust — just uneasiness — nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a... a... faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. That was evident in such things as the deplorable state of the station. He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him — why? Perhaps because he was never ill . . . He had served three terms of three years out there . . . Because triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself."