Vivienne Westwood Quotes

As the first generation of Chinese Communism passes, we are baffled by its unexpected successes

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was neither a revolution, nor great, nor cultural, and, in particular, not in the least proletarian.

We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right.

Study Chairman Mao's writings, follow his teaching and act according to his instructions.

The influence of the Gang of Four should not be underrated, but it should be noted that 97 or 98 per cent of the population hate them intensely for their crimes. This was shown by the mass movement against the Gang of Four which erupted at Tiananmen Square on April 5, 1976, when the Gang were still riding high, Chairman Mao was critically ill and Premier Zhou had passed away.

I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement.

I joined the Party definitely in 1923 after having already been in sympathy with it before.

From 1945 to 1991, China was engaged in a series of wars that nearly broke them. This generation has been through hell: the Great Leap Forward, hunger, starvation, near collision with the Russians - the Cultural Revolution gone mad. I have no doubt that this generation wants a peaceful rise.

I grew up pretty much prevented from knowing anything from Communist China except that they were the bad guys that stole our country.

I mean, where I come from, 'communism' is not a terrible word.

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.

Not long ago, a hat was a conformist accessory. Then the 1960s came along, and young people didn't want to wear hats.

Comrade Deng Xiaoping - along with other party elders - gave the party leadership their firm and full support to put down the political disturbance using forceful measures.

Political prodigies are rare in a nation that grooms top leaders through decades of Communist Party road-testing and pageantry. And because Chairman Mao's cult of personality led the country into extremism, the Party spent the next three decades engineering its politicians to be as indistinguishable as possible.

During the Cultural Revolution, the communists came in, and what they wanted to do was eradicate all sense of traditional Chinese culture.

Although I never marched through the streets shouting for Mao, I do believe that the liberation of China at the end of the 1940s was a wonderful thing and to provide its people with a billion pairs of shoes and trousers was a fantastic achievement.

All revolutions devour their own children.

We may have to ASSASSINATE some of the people you elect on Nov. 7! This could be your LAST ELECTION CHANCE, to save this Republic... Sorry to have to be so blunt, but the country is in mortal danger from our present government and our liberty is already near dead because of this government. If you are too stupid to turn things around with your vote, there are people out here like me who are willing to turn things around with guns, force and violence

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

The Communist is a Socialist in a violent hurry.

I declare that the Russian revolution is a cultural and constructive movement, the only movement capable of saving Russia from political dissolution

A party is only revolutionary on condition of revolutionizing the heads of women and men.

Heads will fall, heads will be chopped off, of course. But just think how good communism is! The state won’t bother us anymore, you women will be free, marriage problems won’t plague you anymore.

A younger generation of Iranians, whose worldviews were forged in the atrocities of the Iran-Iraq War, have come to power, wielding a more fervently ideological approach to politics than their predecessors. The children of the Revolution are now its leaders.