Benito Mussolini Quotes

The Socialists, and I am still one, although an exasperated one, never brought forward the question of irredentism, but left it to the Republicans. We are in favour of a national war. But there are also reasons, purely socialist in character, which spur us on towards intervention.

Karl Marx, too, was a jingoist. In 1855 he wrote that Germany would have been obligated to declare war against Russia; and in 1870 he said of the French: ‘They must be defeated! They will never be sufficiently beaten.’ And when in 1871 the Socialists of France, with Latin ingenuousness, after declaring the Republic, sent a passionate appeal to the Germans for peace, Karl Marx said: ‘These imbeciles of Frenchmen claim that for their rag of a republic we should renounce all the advantages of this war.’ One does not deny one’s country. It is possible to remain a Socialist and be in favour of certain wars.

Science is now in the process of destroying religious dogma. The dogma of the divine creation is recognized as absurd.

Some still ask of us: what do you want? We answer with three words that summon up our entire program. Here they are…Italy, Republic, Socialization. . .Socialization is no other than the implantation of Italian Socialism…

We are syndicalists, because we think that by means of the mass it may be possible to determine an economic readjustment…

Social Democracy seems to have a very ambiguous position. First of all one wonders why it is called Social Democracy. A democracy is already necessarily social; we think, however that this Social Democracy is a kind of Trojan horse which holds within it an army against whom we shall always be at war.

Foolish and reactionary and Conservative contraband practices must not be carried on under the Fascista flag… We are the first to recognize that a State law should grant the eight-hour day, and that there should be social legislation corresponding to the exigencies of the new times.

The outbreak of a socialist revolution in one country will cause the others to imitate it or so to strengthen the proletariat as to prevent its national bourgeoisie from attempting any armed intervention.

I think that within five or six months’ time there will be quite a few Socialists who will recognize that I am the only Socialist that there has been in Italy for the last five years; and I am not being paradoxical, even if I add that the Socialist Party on the whole is detestable.

For my part I prefer fifty thousand rifles to five million votes.

A unanimous, universally-accepted theory of Socialism did not exist after 1905, when the revisionist movement began in Germany under the leadership of Bernstein, which under pressure of the tendencies of the time, a Left Revolutionary movement also appeared, which though never getting further than talk in Italy, in Russian Socialistic circles laid the foundations of Bolshevism.

You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!

I shall defend this pact with all my strength, and if Fascism does not follow me in collaboration with the Socialists, at least no one can force me to follow Fascism.

Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth … then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity... From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.

The Truth Apparent, apparent to everyone's eyes who are not blinded by dogmatism, is that men are perhaps weary of liberty. They have a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer the virgin, chaste and severe, to be fought for … we have buried the putrid corpse of liberty … the Italian people are a race of sheep.