Great Throughts Treasury

"I have never been tender with the tragic and Shakespearean figure Sharon."

"I have never met a man more shy than Clark Gable. He was so shy, you couldn't make him talk."

"I have expressed my opinion through the written word through my books, that is all."

"I have reached the conclusion that those who have physical courage also have moral courage. Physical courage is a great test."

"I know I am a writer; it is the only thing I am sure of."

"I love soldiers. They are my kids, they are my children."

"I have often had disagreements with the Israelis, ugly ones, and I have defended the Palestinians a great deal. Maybe more than they deserved."

"I must admit that I am not generous with weak people. It's not in my nature or in my personality. My parents were not generous with weak people, see?"

"I no longer have the energy to get really angry, like I used to."

"I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism."

"I used to be truly fond of Federico Fellini. I'm no longer fond of him. I don't like him at all."

"I stand with Israel, I stand with the Jews. I stand just as I stood as a young girl during the time when I fought with them, and when the Anna Marias were shot."

"If I'm alive, I will go to my friends in Carrara, where there is the marble. They are all anarchists. With them, I take the explosives. I blow it up!"

"If they were thinking to give me three years in jail, I will say or do something for which they give me nine years! I am capable of everything if I get angry."

"If you put a pistol against my head and ask which I think is worse, Muslims or Mexicans, I'd have to think a moment, then I'd say the Muslims because they've broken my balls."

"If you make a mistake, you spoil everything."

"If you kick the ass of an Algerian or a Moroccan or a Nigerian or a Sudanese, you get lynched."

"In hell, the Nobel Prize honors he who does not receive it."

"In giving the number of Israelis killed since the beginning of the Second Intifada, a noted daily newspaper found it appropriate to underline in capital letters that more people are killed in their traffic accidents."

"In my old age, I have been thinking about this, and I have reached the conclusion that those who have physical courage also have moral courage."

"I'm going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now."

"In France, the France of Liberty-Equality-Fraternity, they burn synagogues, terrorize Jews, profane their cemeteries."

"In obedience to the stupid, vile, dishonest fashion of Political Correctness, the usual opportunists exploit the word Peace."

"In Sweden they asked that the Nobel Peace Prize given to Shimon Peres in 1994 be taken back and conferred on the dove with the olive branch in his mouth, that is on Arafat."

"In the same way that the Muslims would like us all to become Muslims, they would like us all to become homosexuals."

"In war, you've really got a chance sometimes, but we had none. The wall they'd put us up against was a place of execution; if you moved, the police would execute you."

"Islam has always persecuted and silenced its intelligent men."

"It comes from America?s multi-ethnic being, its liberality, its respect for its citizens and guests. Example: about 24 million Americans are Muslim-Arabs. And when a Mustafa or a Mohammed comes, say from Afghanistan, to visit his uncle, nobody tells him he can?t attend pilot training school to learn how to fly a 757 jet airplane. Nobody can keep him from enrolling in a University (something I hope will change) to study chemistry and biology: the two sciences necessary to wage bacteriological war. Nobody. Not even if the government fears that this son of Allah might hijack that 757 or that he might toss a vial full of bacteria into the reservoir and unleash a disaster. (I say ?if? because this time the government knew absolutely nothing and the disgrace of the CIA and FBI goes beyond all bounds. If I were President of the United States I?d send them all packing for stupidity with well-placed kicks to the posterior.) Having said that, let?s go back to the original thought. What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It?s their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology. Those impressive skyscrapers, so tall, so beautiful that while you raise your eyes to gaze at them you almost forget the pyramids and the divine buildings of our past. Those gigantic airplanes, oversized, which they now use as they once used sailing ships or trucks because everything here is moved by airplane. Everything. The mail, fresh fish, ourselves. (And don?t forget that they invented the air war. Or at least they?re the ones who developed it to the point of absurdity.) That terrifying Pentagon, that fortress which scares you just looking at it. That all-present, all-powerful science. That chilling technology that in a few short years has completely changed our daily lives, our millennial ways of communicating, eating, living. And where did he strike them, the reverend Osama Bin Laden? In the skyscrapers and in the Pentagon. How? With airplanes, with science and technology. By the way: do you know what gets me the most about this wretched multi-millionaire, this AWOL playboy who instead of courting blonde princesses and running wild in the night clubs (as he used to do in Beirut when he was 20 years old) enjoys himself by killing people in the name of Mohammed and Allah? The fact that his endless wealth comes from the earnings of a corporation specializing in demolition, and that he himself is a demolitions expert. Demolition is an American specialty."

"Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?"

"It is the mainspring of life, courage. And courage has many faces."

"It must be terribly lonely to be a king instead of a man."

"It's funny that, with the marvelous architecture we have in Italy, I desired a house like this. I grew up with this obsession of a white house with a black door."

"It was scary, because there were minefields, and you never knew where the mines were."

"I've always disliked kamikazes, that is, people who commit suicide in order to kill others. Starting with the Japanese ones from World War II. I never considered them Pietro Miccas who torch the powder and go up with the citadel in order to block the arrival of the enemy troops at Torino. I never considered them soldiers."

"Laura Bush has the face of my mother when my mother was young. The face, the body, the voice. The first time I saw on TV Laura Bush, I got frozen because it was as if my mother was not dead. 'Oh, Mama,' I said, 'Mama.'"

"Listening to someone talk isn't at all like listening to their words played over on a machine. What you hear when you have a face before you is never what you hear when you have before you a winding tape."

"Let us discuss Federico Fellini, just for a change. It is our duty to discuss him, for the sake of the nation."

"Khomeini was not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king ? a real leader."

"My soldier weapon is the weapon of truth."

"Our weakness in the West is born of the fact of so-called "objectivity." Objectivity does not exist. The word is ahypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: Sometimes truth stays on one side only."

"My cancers are so bad that I think I've arrived at the end of the road. What a pity. I would like to live not only because I love life so much, but because I'd like to see the result of the trial. I do think I will be found guilty."

"Nobody obliged Bush to do anything about Terri Schiavo, or to take a stand on stem cells. But he did."

"Obviously my homeland, my Italy, is not the Italy of today. The scheming, vulgar, fat-dumb-and-happy Italy of Italians whose only concern is getting their pensions by 50 and whose only passions are foreign vacations and soccer matches. The rotten, stupid, cowardly Italy, of little hyenas who would sell their daughter to a Beirut whorehouse in order to shake the hand of a Hollywood divo or diva but if Osama Bin Laden?s kamikazes reduce thousands of New Yorkers to a mountain of ashes that seem like ground coffee they snigger contentedly good-it-serves-America-right. The squalid, faint-hearted, soulless Italy, of presumptuous and incompetent political parties that don?t know how to win or lose but know how to glue the fat posteriors of their representatives into the seat of a deputy or minister or mayor. The still-Mussolinesque Italy of black and red fascists that make you think of Ennio Flaiano?s terrible joke: ?In Italy there are two kinds of fascists: fascists and anti-fascists.? Nor is it the Italy of the magistrates and politicians who in their ignorance of proper verb tense commit monstrous errors of syntax while pontificating on television screens. (You don?t say, ?If it was,? you animals! You say ?If it were.?) Nor is it the Italy of young people who, having similar teachers, are drowning in the most scandalous ignorance, the most excruciating superficiality, drowning in emptiness. So that they add errors of spelling to errors of syntax and if you ask them who the Carbonari were, who the liberals were, who Silvio Pellico was, who Mazzini was, who Massimo D?Azeglio was, who Cavour was, who Victor Emmanuel II was, they look at you with dulled pupils and dangling tongues. They know nothing or at most they know how to play the comfortable role of aspiring terrorists in a time of peace and democracy, how to wave black flags, hide their faces behind ski masks, the little fools. Inept fools. And even less is it the Italy of the chattering insects who after reading this will hate me for having written the truth. Between one bowl of spaghetti and another they?ll curse me and hope I get killed by one of those whom they protect, that is by Osama Bin Laden. No, no: my Italy is an ideal Italy. It?s an Italy that I dreamed of as a young girl, when I was discharged from the Italian Volunteer Army Corps of Liberty, and I was full of illusions. An intelligent, dignified, courageous Italy, and therefore worthy of respect. And this Italy, an Italy that exists even if it is silenced or ridiculed or insulted--woe to anyone who lays a finger on it. Woe to anyone who robs it from me or invades it. Because whether the invaders are Napoleon?s French or Francis Joseph?s Austrians or Hitler?s Germans or Osama Bin Ladin?s comrades, it?s all the same to me. Whether they invade it using cannons or rubber dinghies, ditto. And with that I bid you an affectionate farewell, by dear Ferruccio, and I warn you: ask nothing further of me. Least of all, to get involved in disputes or pointless polemics. I?ve said what I had to say. Anger and pride ordered me to. Age and a clean conscience allowed me to. But now I have to get back to work; I don?t want to be disturbed. End of story."

"People like me who have passion are derided: 'Ha ha ha! She's hysterical!' 'She's very passionate!' Listen how the Americans speak about me: 'A very passionate Italian.'"

"Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty."

"Physical courage is a great test."

"Poor Father, he did the wrong thing. He gave me a powerful slap - he stared me in the eyes and said, A girl does not, must not, cry."

"So here?s my answer to your question on the Contrast-between-the-Two-Cultures: I say in this world there?s room for everyone. In your own home you can do whatever you want. And if in some countries the women are so stupid as to accept the chador, or rather the veil you peer out of through a close-meshed net at eye level, that?s their problem. If they are such birdbrains as to accept not going to school, not going to the doctor, not having their pictures taken, that?s their problem. If they are such idiots as to marry some asshole who wants four wives, that?s their problem. If their men are so silly as not to drink beer or wine, ditto. Far be it from me to stand in their way. I was raised with the concept of liberty, I was, and my mother used to say: ?Variety is what makes the world beautiful.? But if they presume to impose the same things on me, in my home... And they do presume it. Osama Bin Laden says that the entire planet Earth must become Muslim, that we must convert to Islam, that he will convert us by fair means or foul, that this is why he massacres us and will continue to do so. And this can?t be pleasing to us. It can?t help but make us itch to turn the tables and kill him. But this thing won?t end, won?t die out with the death of Osama Bin Laden. Because there are tens of thousands of Osama Bin Ladens by now, and they?re not only in Afghanistan or in other Arabic countries. They?re everywhere, and the most hardened ones are right in the Western world. In our cities, in our roads, in our universities, in the ganglions of technology. That technology that any dolt can handle. The Crusade has been in progress for some time. It works like a Swiss watch, sustained by a faith and a malice comparable only to the faith and malice of Torquemada when he led the Inquisition. The fact is that dealing with them is impossible. Reasoning, unthinkable. Treating them with indulgence, tolerance or hope, suicide. Whoever thinks differently is deluded."

"State-run television stations contribute to the resurgent anti-Semitism, crying only over Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over them in unwilling tones."

"Sons of Allah breed like rats."