The Little Red Book was actually compiled by members of the
Gang of Four as part of their
campaign to nearly deify
Mao Zedong in order to ride on the
crest of the
wave that they were raising him on. It certainly was a
prominent tool during the
Cultural Revolution of the mid-
1960s and was even brandished by rioting
students in
Paris during the incidents of
1967. Consisting of excerpts from various essays written by Mao in the
1950s but also a few bits from the days of the
Long March, one that stands out for me is "Power flows from the barrel of a
gun."
Then, of course, there's always John Lennon's "Happiness is a Warm Gun". I could make a joke about (Groucho) Marxist-Lennonist thought here but just won't.