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In a particularly pungent and often inaccurate diatribe against education, Mao said: "It is reported that penicillin was invented by a laundryman in a dyer's shop. Benjamin Franklin of America discovered electricity, although he began as a newspaper boy. Confucius got started at 23. What learning did Jesus have? Sākyamuni created Buddhism when he was 19. When Marx first created dialectical materialism, he was very young. He acquired his learning later." Mao's conclusion: "It is always those with less learning who overthrow those with more learning."
Mao fancies himself the champion of Marxist purity, combatting the "revisionist" heresies of Moscow and Belgrade. Yet his expositions of dialectics are sometimes primitive, to say the least. In a speech in Hangchow in 1965, Mao tried to explain the complex Hegelian-Marxist concept of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" by explaining that the Communists' victory over Chiang Kai-shek's armies in the civil war was due to the superiority of the Marxist digestive system: "Synthesis in the long run amounts to swallowing the enemy completely. How did we synthesize the Kuomintang? Didn't we take enemy personnel and reform them? Some of them we released, but the majority we took into our forces. Eating is also synthesis. When you're eating crab, for instance, you eat only the meat and not the shell. The stomach absorbs nourishment and expels waste. You gentlemen are all Western philosophers, while I'm a native philosopher. The synthesis we applied to the Kuomintang was to eat it up, absorb the greater part and expel the smaller part. This is what we learned from Marx."
In spite of Mao's crude and often ferocious rhetoric, the Mao papers show that the Chairman can tread prudently when faced with political and military realities. Several of his speeches also suggest that Mao feels there is a vital historical and ideological bond between the Soviet Union and China, in spite of what he considers to be betrayal by Stalin and Khrushchev. "In articles and speeches, don't criticize the U.S.S.R.," he instructed the Chinese High Command in 1958. "We learn from the good people and the good things in the Soviet Union as well as from the bad," he observed in 1966, after the quarrel between the two nations had flared into the open.
Mao offered that advice despite his deep resentment of Russia's attempts to prevent China from determining its own fate. "The Russians didn't allow China to make a revolution," he once said. "This was in 1945, when Stalin tried to prevent the Chinese revolution by saying that there should be no civil war and that we should collaborate with Chiang Kaishek. This we did not do, and the revolution was victorious." Mao later quarreled with Khrushchev. More recently, Moscow's border clashes with Peking and its attempts to organize opposition to Mao within China have encouraged the Chairman to permit even harsher criticism of the Soviets.