Indro Montanelli Quotes

L'elenco degli affiliati alla P2 comprende, dicono, 953 nomi, cui corrispondono i più alti gradi della politica, della magistratura, delle forze armate, della burocrazia, dell'industria, della finanza. Tutti «fratelli». È la riprova che, in questo Paese, guai ai figli unici.

[...] the love of power excludes all others.

Pertini has interpreted as their best the worst about Italians.

In Italy there is a fringe of imbeciles who believe they can resurrect communism. To bury the corpse of Marxism is not easy, because for many people that would mean denying the whole of existence. Of course Bertinotti is not one of those: he knows nothing about Marxism, he doesn't care, he is a little clown, an Italian-style populist who stirs masses of poor devils in the streets and still speaks of the working masses that only he sees.

Depression is a democratic sickness: it afflicts everyone.

We Italians owe something to Elvis Presley: it's one of the rare occasions when we prefer to be Italian rather than American.

Storia d'Italia, volume l'Italia degli anni di fango.

The only advice that I'm in the mood to give - and that I give regularly - to young people is this: fight for what you believe in. You will lose, just like I have lost, all the battles. You may only win one. The one that you engage every morning, in front of the mirror.

I do not want to suffer, I do not have a christian concept of suffering. They tell us that suffering elevates the spirit; no suffering is something that hurts and that's all, it elevates nothing. And therefore I fear suffering. Because with regards to death, I, who in everything believe to be moderate, am absolutely radical. If we have a right to life, we have also a right to death. It rests on us, and it must be recognized the right to choose the when and the how of our own death.

Men do not know how to appreciate or measure luck except that of others. Their own never.

Let not the usual abstract arguments be brought to me, like the sacredness of life: no one contests the right of everyone to arrange their own life, I don't see why their own death has to be contested.

The American death penalty exists and resists in America because it was a basic and constitutive element of its birth and development. Of the famous 102 Pilgrims who first landed from the Mayflower on that Continent not to plunder as the Spaniards and Portuguese did in Mexico and in South America, but to build you a new and free society, about two thirds were convicts escaping Justice and the jails of Europe, and a third were men that sought freedom and above all religious freedom. The former had a pistol in their pocket, the latter the Bible, but in its Calvinist version of the law of retaliation, based on the idea of an executioner God that demands death of those who deliver it without just cause.

Democracy is always, by nature and constitution, the triumph of mediocrity.

It isn't necessary to be socialists in order to love Pertini. Whatever he says or does, smells of cleanliness, of loyalty and of sincerity.

Gladio had been established in almost all of the countries that belonged to Nato. And by Nato's will, aware that its European partners could not have withstood the attack of a super-armed Soviet Union, they would have had to wait an American intervention for a comeback. It's demonstrated by the fact that when this plan was revealed, no other country found much to say about it. Only we Italians – the usual idiot novelists and perhaps something worse than idiots – made it the subject of scandal and a pretext of «Crime fictions» that still find credit, as your letter shows. I also feel shocked, and bit offended. But only because no one has asked me to join Gladio: I would have done it with enthusiasm.