Great Throughts Treasury

"The larger truth, the universal truth that you can give in a novel, is far greater than what you can give through journalism."

"The left that 20 years ago permitted one of its union processionals to deposit a coffin in front of the synagogue of Rome forgets the contribution made by the Jews to the fight against fascism."

"The clash between us and them is not a military one. It's a cultural one, a religious one, and the worst is still to come."

"The bloodthirsty fanatics of the Bolshevik Revolution burned the icons and executed the clergymen and used the churches as warehouses. No honest person can suggest that my ideas belong to that kind of people."

"The more democratic and open a society is, the more it's exposed to terrorism. The more a country is free, not governed by a police regime, the more it risks hijackings or massacres like the ones that took place for many years in Italy and Germany and other parts of Europe."

"The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture ? it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization."

"The struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions."

"The questions are brutal because research of truth is a kind of surgery."

"The most humiliating thing a woman can be is a coquette."

"The very ones who inaugurated terrorism, killing us on airplanes, in airports, at the Olympics, today entertain themselves by killing western journalists."

"The West reveals a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive."

"The youth of Holland and Germany and Denmark flaunt the kaffiah just as Mussolini's avant garde used to flaunt the club and the fascist badge."

"These charlatans care about the Palestinians as much as I care about the charlatans. That is not at all."

"This Islam business kidnapped me."

"To speak of oneself means to lay bare one?s own soul, expose it like a body to the sun. To lay bare one?s own soul is not at all like taking off one?s brassiere on a crowded beach!"

"There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape."

"War is something Arafat sends others to do for him. That is, the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent caused the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Clinton's mediation."

"What's the point anyway ? Of suffering, dying? It teaches us to live, boy. A man who does not struggle does not live, he survives."

"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."

"Too many Spaniards still have the Koran in their blood."

"We do not understand these Americans who, like adolescents, always speak of sex, and who, like adolescents, all of a sudden have discovered that sex is good not only for procreating children."

"We must take positions. Our weakness in the West is born of the fact of so-called 'objectivity.' Objectivity does not exist - it cannot exist! ... The word is a hypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: Sometimes truth stays on one side only."

"When I was given the news, I laughed. The trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true."

"When we met I found you almost stupefied by the heroic efficiency and admirable unity with which the Americans have faced this Apocalypse. That?s right. Despite all the shortcomings that always get rubbed in their face--that I myself always rub in their face (though those of Europe, and of Italy in particular, are even more serious)--America is a country with important things to teach us. And speaking of heroic efficiency, let me sing a paean to the Mayor of New York. That Rudolph Giuliani to whom we Italians should kneel in gratitude. Because he has an Italian last name and an Italian origin and he makes us look good before the whole world. Rudolph Giuliani is a great mayor, one of the greatest. And that?s coming from someone who is never happy with anything or anyone, starting with myself. He?s a mayor worthy of another great mayor with an Italian last name, Fiorello la Guardia, and many of our mayors ought to go and study under him. They ought to come to him with bowed heads, or better with ash on their heads, and ask him: ?Signor Giuliani, sir, please tell us how it?s done.? He doesn?t delegate his duties to others, no. He doesn?t waste his time with bullshit and greed. He doesn?t split himself between the tasks of a mayor and those of a minister or deputy (is anybody listening in the three cities of Stendhal--Naples, Florence and Rome?). He ran over there immediately, and immediately entered the second tower, at the risk of being turned to ashes with all the others. He only made it out by a hair and only by chance. And in the space of four days he put this city back on its feet. A city with nine and a half million inhabitants, mind you, and almost two million in Manhattan alone. How he did it, I don?t know. He?s sick like me, the poor man. The cancer that comes and returns has got him, too. And, like me, he pretends to be healthy: he works anyway. But I work at a desk, for God?s sake, sitting down! He, on the other hand... He looked like a general who joins the battle in person. A soldier who charges with his bayonet: ?Come on, people, come on!!! Let?s roll up our sleeves, move!? But he could do it because those people were, are, like him. People without airs and without laziness, my father would have said, and with balls. As for the admirable ability to unite, the almost martial compactness with which the Americans respond to disaster and to the enemy, well: I have to admit that then and there I was astounded as well. I knew, yes, that it had exploded at the time of Pearl Harbor, that is when the people huddled around Roosevelt and Roosevelt entered the war against the Germany of Hitler and the Italy of Mussolini and the Japan of Hirohito. I had caught a whiff of it, yes, after Kennedy?s assassination. But that had been followed by the war in Vietnam, the lacerating rift caused by the war in Vietnam, and in a certain sense it had reminded me of their Civil War of a century and a half ago. So, when I saw whites and blacks crying in each other?s arms--and I mean in each other?s arms--when I saw Democrats and Republicans arm in arm singing ?God Bless America?, when I saw them drop all their differences, I was flabbergasted. Just as I was when I heard Bill Clinton (someone for whom I've never harbored much tenderness) declare: ?We must stand behind Bush. We must have faith in our president.? I felt the same when those same words were forcefully repeated by his wife Hillary, now senator for the State of New York. And when they were reiterated by Lieberman, the ex-Democratic candidate for the vice-presidency. (Only the defeated Al Gore remained squalidly silent). I felt the same when Congress voted unanimously to accept war and punish those responsible. Oh, if only Italy would learn this lesson! It?s such a divided country, Italy. So factious, so poisoned by tribal pettiness! They hate each other even within their own parties in Italy. They can?t stick together even when they have the same emblem, or the same banner, for God?s sake! Jealous, bilious, vain, small, they think only of their own personal interests. Of their own careers, their own petty glory, their own small-town popularity. For the sake of their personal interests they spite each other, they betray each other, they accuse each other, they expose each other... I am absolutely convinced that, if Osama Bin Laden were to blow up Giotto?s tower or the Tower of Pisa, the opposition would blame the government. And the government would blame the opposition. The heads of the government and the heads of the opposition would blame their own party people and comrades. And having said this, let me explain where the ability to unite that characterizes the Americans comes from."

"When my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him. My mother found him at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste."

"Why do the people humiliate themselves by voting? I didn't vote because I have dignity. If I had closed my nose and voted for one of them, I would spit on my own face."

"Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion."

"When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die."

"Wojtyla was a warrior, who did more to end the Soviet Union than even America."

"With our progress we have destroyed our only weapon against tedium: that rare weakness we call imagination."

"You cannot govern, you cannot administrate, with an ignoramus."

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

"You cannot work and be at home with your child. But you want both."

"You ask me about the contrast-between-the-Two-Cultures? Well, to be honest, it annoys me even to talk about two cultures, to put them on the same plane... let's be honest: our cathedrals are more beautiful than the mosques and the synagogues."

"You ask me to speak, this time. You ask me to break at least this once the silence I?ve chosen, that I?ve imposed on myself these many years to avoid mingling with chattering insects. And I?m going to. Because I?ve heard that in Italy too there are some who rejoice just as the Palestinians of Gaza did the other night on TV. ?Victory! Victory!? Men, women, children. Assuming you can call those who do such a thing man, woman, child. I?ve heard that some of the insects of means, politicians or so-called politicians, intellectuals or so-called intellectuals, not to mention others not worthy of the title of citizen, are behaving pretty much the same way. They say: ?Good. It serves America right.? And I am very very, very angry. Angry with an anger that is cold, lucid, rational. An anger that eliminates every detachment, every indulgence. An anger that compels me to respond and demands above all that I spit on them. I spit on them. Angry as I am, the African-American poet Maya Angelou roared the other day: ?Be angry. It?s good to be angry, it?s healthy.? And I don?t know whether it?s healthy for me. But I know that it won?t be healthy for them, I mean those who admire Osama Bin Laden, those who express comprehension or sympathy or solidarity for him. Your request has triggered a detonator that?s been waiting too long to explode. You?ll see. You also ask me to tell how I experienced this apocalypse. To give, in other words, my testimony. Very well, I?ll start with that. I was at home, which is in the center of Manhattan. At exactly nine o?clock I had a sensation of danger, of a danger that perhaps would not touch me, but that undoubtedly concerned me. It?s the sensation you feel in war, or rather in combat, when every pore of your skin feels the bullet or the rocket as it approaches, and you perk up your ears and yell at the person next to you: ?Down! Get down!? I pushed it away. It?s not like I was in Vietnam. It?s not like I was in one of the many wars, those fucking wars that have tortured my life since World War II. I was in New York for God's sake, on a marvelous September morning in 2001. But the sensation still possessed me, inexplicably. So I did something I never do in the morning and turned on the TV. The audio wasn?t working. The screen was. And on every channel--and here there are almost a hundred--you saw a tower of the World Trade Center burning like a giant match. A short circuit? A small plane gone off course? Or an act of deliberate terrorism? I stayed there almost paralyzed, fixed on that tower, and while I fixed on it, while I asked myself those three questions, another plane appeared on the screen. White, huge. An airliner. It was flying extremely low. Flying low, it turned toward the second tower like a bomber who draws a bead on a target and then hurls himself at it. That?s when I understood. I also understood because in that same moment the audio came back on and transmitted a chorus of primal screams. Repeated and primal. ?God! Oh, God! Oh, God, God, God! Gooooooood!? And the plane went into that second tower like a knife going into a stick of butter."

"You wear yourself out in the pursuit of wealth or love or freedom, you do everything to gain some right, and once it's gained you take no pleasure in it."

"You've got to get old, because you have nothing to lose. But you don't give a damn."