People from Piedmont

"Quaestiones, quae ad mathematicae fundamenta pertinent, etsi hisce temporibus a multis tractatae, satisfacienti solutione et adhuc carent. Hic difficultas maxime en sermonis ambiguitate oritur. Quare summi interest verba ipsa, quibus utimur attente perpendere."

"In every science, after having analysed the ideas, expressing the more complicated by means of the more simple, one finds a certain number that cannot be reduced among them, and that one can define no further. These are the primitive ideas of the science; it is necessary to acquire them through experience, or through induction; it is impossible to explain them by deduction."

"Certainly it is permitted to anyone to put forward whatever hypotheses he wishes, and to develop the logical consequences contained in those hypotheses. But in order that this work merit the name of Geometry, it is necessary that these hypotheses or postulates express the result of the more simple and elementary observations of physical figures."

"Geometric calculus consists in a system of operations analogous to those of algebraic calculus, but in which the entities on which the calculations are carried out, instead of being numbers, are geometric entities which we shall define."

"These primitive propositions … suffice to deduce all the properties of the numbers that we shall meet in the sequel. There is, however, an infinity of systems which satisfy the five primitive propositions. … All systems which satisfy the five primitive propositions are in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. The natural numbers are what one obtains by abstraction from all these systems; in other words, the natural numbers are the system which has all the properties and only those properties listed in the five primitive propositions"

"1. 0 is a number. 2. The immediate successor of a number is also a number. 3. 0 is not the immediate successor of any number. 4. No two numbers have the same immediate successor. 5. Any property belonging to 0 and to the immediate successor of any number that also has that property belongs to all numbers."

"1. Zero is a number. 2. The successor of any number is another number. 3. There are no two numbers with the same successor. 4. Zero is not the successor of a number. 5. Every property of zero, which belongs to the successor of every number with this property, belongs to all numbers."

"Peano — whether in Logic or in Mathematics — never worked with pure symbolism — he always required that the primitive symbols introduced represent intuitive ideas to be explained with ordinary language."

"I am fascinated by his gentle personality, his ability to attract lifelong disciples, his tolerance of human weakness, his perennial optimism. … Peano may not only be classified as a 19th century mathematician and logician, but because of his originality and influence, must be judged one of the great scientists of that century."

"Bertrand Russell never wavered in acknowledging his intellectual debt to Giuseppe Peano. In many ways the contribution that Russell made to the foundations of mathematics, culminating in Principia Mathematica, strongly bears Peano's mark."

"He was a man I greatly admired from the moment I met him for the first time in 1900 at a Congress of Philosophy, which he dominated by the exactness of his mind."

"We would have to make clear to our German ally our disagreement on three points: treatment of the occupied countries, excesses towards the Jews, and relations with the Papacy. One ought to try to create a true European federation respectful of each nationality."

"I've been in contact with Marshal Badoglio. We agree that Italy must be saved from the abyss toward which Fascism is driving her. If we depose Mussolini, however, the new government should do nothing drastic to upset Hitler until we can secretly negotiate an armistice with the Allies."

"I am very much afraid that the loss of Cyrenaica will have serious political consequences for the Duce."

"The Duce told me that he foresaw the possibility of a conflict between Germany and Russia. He said that we could not stay out of this because it involved the struggle against communism. It was, therefore, necessary to make arrangements for the bringing together between Ljubljana and Zagreb of a motorized division, of an armored division, and of the grenadier division."

"The assault on Malta will cost us many casualties… But I am the one who wants it because I consider it absolutely essential for the future development of the war. If we take Malta, Libya will be safe. If not, the situation of the colony will always be precarious."

"If I announce the armistice and the Americans don't send sufficient reinforcements and don't land near Rome, the Germans will seize the city and put in a puppet fascist government."

"There is no doubt that Jacomoni and Visconti Prasca have a large share of the responsibility in the Albanian affair, but the real blame must be sought elsewhere. It lies entirely with the Duce's command. This is a command that he, the Duce, cannot hold. Let him leave everything to us, and when things go wrong let him punish those responsible."

"Militarily it was impossible to invade with the dispositions we had made. We had only seven divisions in Albania. Two of them were necessary to hold the Albanian population from going into revolt. Two others were in reserve. That left us three divisions with which to undertake an offensive. Against us, the Greeks disposed of fifteen divisions. We might have been able to undertake an offensive had those figures been reversed."

"I think if we call in the experts we can draw up the full scheme, with the rallying points arranged."

"By this act, all ties with the dreadful past are broken, and my government will be proud to be able to march with you on to the inevitable victory."

"Sir, give me a single battalion of the Royal Carabineers and I will drive these upstarts into the sea."

"The Germans will make a few scattered attacks, then go away. The Romans will enjoy a fine September."

"When Mussolini decided on war he did not take my advice or that of any other Army chief. In August 1939 the Duce had not been so sure about the invincibility of the Germans, and he told us that he had sought to persuade Hitler not to act."

"Il soldato è come il monaco, per cui l'ordine si chiama obbedienza."

"Io ho conquistato all'Italia un impero e Mussolini l'ha buttato via."

"Non sono mai stato un generale ribelle e l'ho dimostrato sino all'ultimo."

"(A Mussolini) Vostra Eccellenza può contare ora e sempre sulla mia completa e assoluta devozione."

"Io i miei nemici li strangolo lentamente col guanto di velluto."

"Non posso abbandonarmi a voli di fantasia perché ciò è contrario alla mia natura."

"Io sono un militare e non so nulla di correnti politiche."

"Se orgoglio ho io, è quello di aver sempre servito fedelmente e con devozione illimitata voi, Duce."

"C'è un veleno che corrode le dittature: l'incenso. La rovina delle dittature sono i ras osannanti."

"I did not spittel a drop of blood, or steal a cent in all my life."

"If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words — our lives — our pains — nothing! The taking of our lives — lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler — all! That last moment belongs to us — that agony is our triumph."

"I wish to say to you that I am innocent. I have never done a crime, some sins, but never any crime. I thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only this one, but of all, all. I am an innocent man. I now wish to forgive some people for what they are doing to me."

"Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was innocent."

"Constructions of a-rhythmical forms, the clash between concrete and abstract forms.. ..The acute angle is passionate and dynamic, expressing will and a penetrating force."

"The Cubists, to be objective, restrict themselves to considering things by turning around them, to produce their geometric writing. So they remain at a stage of intelligence which sees everything and feels nothing, which brings everything to a standstill in order to describe everything. We Futurists are trying, on the contrary, with the power of intuition, to place ourselves at the very center of things, in such a way that our ego forms with their own uniqueness a single complex. We thus give plastic planes a plastic expansion in space, obtaining this feeling of something in perpetual motion which is peculiar to everything living."

"We insist that our concept of perspective is the total antitheses of all static perspective. It is dynamic and chaotic in application, producing in the mind of the observer a veritable mass of plastic emotions."

"[paintings as] the plastic equivalent of the sounds, noises and smells found in theaters, music-halls, cinemas, brothels, railways station, ports."

"Reds, rrrrreds, the rrrrreddest rrrrreds that shouuuuuuut."

"When we talk of architecture, people usually think of something static; this is wrong. What we are thinking of is an architecture similar to the dynamic and musical architecture achieved by the Futurist musician Pratella. Architecture is found in the movement of colours, of smoke from a chimney and in metallic structures, when they are expressed in states of mind which are violent and chaotic."

"This bubbling and whirling of forms and lights, composed of sounds, noises, and smells has been partly achieved by me in my 'Anarchical funeral' [the painting Carra painted ca 1910-1911, ed.].. ..by Umberto Boccioni in his 'States of Minds' and 'Forces of a Street' [both paintings Boccioni painted in 1911], by Russolo in 'Rebellion' (1911) and Severini in 'Pan-Pan [the first version, Severini painted in 1909-1911], paintings which were violently discussed at our first Paris exhibition in 1912."

"..that dizzy seething of forms and acoustic lights, rowdy and smelly [visible in the paintings at the Futurist exhibition, February 1912 in Paris].. ..to obtain this total painting which calls for the active cooperation of all the senses: painting of the plastic mood of the universal, you have to paint the way drunkards sing and vomit, sounds, noises and smells."

"We [The Futurists] stand for a use of colour free from the imitation of objects and things as coloured objects. We stand for an aerial vision in which the material of colour is expressed in all of the manifold possibilities our subjectivity can create."

"Boccioni and I were swiftly persuaded that with this show in Paris we were staking our all; for a flop would have meant kissing our fine aspirations goodbye. This is why we decided to go to Paris, to see what the art situation there was like."

"He (Picasso, ed.) is almost one of us [the Futurists]."

"Boccioni, Russolo and I all met in the Porta Vittoria café [in Milan, Italy], close to where we all lived, and we enthusiastically outlined a draft of our appeal [the Manifesto of Futurist Painters, late February, 1910]. The final version was somewhat laborious; we worked on it all day, all three of us and finished it that evening with Marinetti and the help of Decio Cinti, the group's secretary."

"The idea for this picture came to me one winter's night as I was leaving La Scala. In the foreground there is a snow sweeper with a few couples, men in top hats and elegant ladies. I think that this canvas, which is totally unknown in Italy, is one of the paintings where I best represented the concept that I had the time about my art."

"I was walking along the Boulevard des Italiens [in February 1912, during a group exhibition of Futurist painters in Paris] when, as I passed in front of a newspaper stand, I had the pleasant surprise of seeing on the front page of the Journal the reproduction of my picture 'The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli'."

"Stumbling into the midst of anarchists, barely 18 years old, I too started to dream of 'inevitable changes, inhuman society, free love', etc."

"I have said that Marinetti was.. ..exceptionally gifted, and I should add that I never saw him twiddling his thumbs even for ten minutes.. ..beside his desk he often kept piles of books in which he would write dedications.. ..invariably with the purpose of spreading the word about Futurism."

"Volli, sempre volli, fortissimamente volli."

"Non nella pena, Nel delitto è la infamia."

"Usurpator diffida Di tutti sempre."

"A giurar presti i mentitor son sempre."

"Ove son leggi, Tremar non dee chi leggi non infranse."

"J'avais vu les grands, mais je n'avais pas vu les petits."

"Alta vendetta D'alto silenzio è figlia."

"D'uomo è il fallir, ma dal malvagio il buono Scerne il dolor del fallo."

"Sempre il miglior non è il parer primiero."

"Spesso è da forte, Più che il morire, il vivere."

"Che amar chi t'odia, ell'è impossibil cosa."

"I cannot kill. Unfortunately, there are so many who can and do kill. As I cannot kill I cannot authorize others to kill. Do you see? If you are buying from a butcher you are authorizing him to kill — kill helpless, dumb creatures, which neither I nor you could kill ourselves. So that I am for that reason a vegetarian, as most Russians are. For nine years I have been a vegetarian, and I shall be one — mind, I am a man with strong convictions — to the end of my life."

"Prince Paul Troubetzkoy is one of the few geniuses of whom it is not only safe but necessary to speak in superlatives. He is the most astonishing sculptor of modern times. … Troubetzkoy is a gigantic and terrifying humanitarian who can do anything with an animal except eat it. Some of us remember the inaugural banquet in London of the International Society of Painters, at which the late Lord Haldane, presiding, announced, when all the conventional speechmaking was over, that the illustrious sculptor Paul Troubetzkoy desired to address the company, and how a figure of Patagonian stature arose amid polite applause, and began "Mr. President: is it not a monstrous thing that we, who are supposed to be artists and civilized men, and not savages, should be celebrating a great artistic occasion by gorging ourselves on the slaughtered corpses of our fellow creatures?""

"From time to time he [Leo Tolstoy] posed – a tiring obligation – for painters and sculptors: for Repin, Pasternak who did a study of the family, Aronson, and Paolo Trubetskoy. Trubetskoy, a Russian educated in Italy, did some splendid little statues of Tolstoy – one of him on horseback. Father was very fond of him. A sweet and childlike person in addition to his great gifts, he read practically nothing, spoke little, all his life was wrapped up in sculpture. As a convinced vegetarian he would not eat meat but cried: “Je ne mange pas de cadavre!” if anyone offered him some. In his studio in St. Petersburg there was a whole zoo: a bear, a fox, a horse, and a vegetarian wolf."

"In the name of Stalin we always won, in the name of Stalin all victories will be ours."

"We know that our struggle is not easy, that it will still be long and hard because the big capital is determined to betray the fatherland and to commit all kind of crimes just to save its privileges; yet we know that the path showed us by Stalin is the right one and that following this path we'll be able to conquer victory."

"First I will confess very often and I will receive Communion whenever the confessor gives me permission. Second: I wish to sanctify feastdays. Third: my friends will be Jesus and Mary. Fourth: death but not sins."

"Like Saint Dominic Savio, be missionaries of good example, good words, good action at home, with neighbours and colleagues at work. At every age we can and we must bear witness to Christ! Commitment to bear witness is permanent and daily."

"I believe being a bishop in Mongolia is very similar to the episcopal ministry of the early Church, the Church is a very small reality, it is a minority but there is this group of Mongolian faithful who have chosen, with great courage and also a sense of responsibility, to follow the Lord and become part of the Catholic Church."

"I thank everyone, priests, religious and laity for the affection towards our Pastor, and especially you children, who are the loving face of Christ for the world."

"More than tolerance, we must stress citizenship."

"I personally think that when we make decisions it is better to err on the side of an excess of generosity, instead of rigidity."

"The Holy See gives voice to those who have no voice. This is perhaps a poetic way to phrase it. But I would like to point out that this is the most challenging, interesting, sometimes difficult, but always gratifying side of my daily activity. I am referring to dioceses, associations, religious congregations, and individuals who turn to us, confident that we can help them to meet with and present to the right offices and persons their views and requests, which are usually humanitarian in nature."

"The missions are recorded in the DNA of the Church in Poland, which was born, grew up and was formed in society through the Missionary activities of its patron."

"The Congregation has the task of deepening, developing and promoting the fundamental principles of Catholic education, as proposed by the Magisterium of the Church, both regarding the People of God, as well as society at large. In this sense, it is committed to ensuring that the faithful can fulfill their obligations in this area, and that society at large might also recognize and protect their rights."

"Today also, Christians must resort to this method: take the new paths to progress and preserve the treasures of the past. "Nova et Vetera" are the words that can harmonize modernity and tradition. For example, the principle of the distinction between the political and the religious spheres has become clearer in the minds of believers today. That is now a value acquired and recognized by the Church. It belongs therefore to the heritage of civilization that has been achieved today. This principle of secularity entails respect for every religion by the State, but it certainly doesn’t absolve the State from heeding the religious needs of its citizens."

"The Catholic Church in Turkey will know how to react to this loss. We are certain that the death of Mgr. Padovese will bear fruit for a new flourishing of the Gospel and for Turkey's Christian community in general."

"The libertas Ecclesiae, the freedom that is intrinsic to it, is in any case stronger than any possible limitation that gets imposed on it, because it derives from the mandate of Christ and has the deep, immense breath of the Spirit: it is the freedom of that love that inhabits it – so old and always new – for man, who is the living image of God."

"Augustine is a very African saint. He was a Berber, it seems - "Afer sum" he said of himself – as much as a Roman, and better yet, a European. Saint Augustine is a figure who brings us together: truly a catholic."

"Building peace for tomorrow requires doing justice today."

"I am an anarchist, this is because I am moved by the suffering of hundreds of millions of workers and I struggle for a world in which such exploitation is no longer possible."

"Women are already doing the work of ordained deacons in many places, so I don't see why such a reality can’t be acknowledged. I believe this is only a matter of power."

"Evangelicals grew particularly in the suburban areas and in regions of recent deforestation and rural occupation by migrants. We're not as fast as those churches and we haven't been able to secure our presence in those areas. We always noticed a sentiment of abandonment by the people in the region. They usually tell us that they joined the church that was available."

"God will use each one of you to build His house thanks to the precious talents received from Him. Though we are limited in some aspects of human nature, God can still use us to accomplish His plans."

"Jesus Christ made Peter the leader of the other Apostles and appointed him as the foundation and source of unity of faith and community in the Church. Metropolitan Archbishops must be vigilant to maintain unity and communion with the successor of Peter, the Vicar of Christ and the visible head of the Church, namely the Holy Father."

"We must start anew from the Paschal Event to encounter our European culture. Christianity carries in its heart a "death of God", a night, that went beyond any cultural proclamation of the nothingness or of the "death of God". In the reason for Christ on the Cross we can find all the reasons of man. I believe that this is the most breathtaking point in the encounter between Christian annunciation and our European culture."

"I began at once to visit the places where the new establishments were to rise, and I saw what an abundant harvest the Lord prepared for us."

"Don Bosco organized his first missionary enterprise. The heroic band was composed of ten priests and coadjutor Salesian Brothers and fifteen Sisters of Mary, Help of Christians. Don Cagliero (now a prince of the Church), a favorite disciple of Don Bosco, whom he had never left from the age of thirteen, and who had become one of the most learned and saintly sons of the Society, was appointed the director of the mission."

"When we are healthy we are under the illusion that sickness, and death even more so, touch the life of others, but never our own."

"I'm happy to inform you of Guido's great success and that I've brought him into my orchestra, which holds him in high regard, as I do. This is the first time in my long career that I've encountered such a gifted young man."

"Maestro Cantelli was a few years younger than I, but despite this, he exerted on me a special fascination. I listened to his stories, followed him with enthusiasm, and felt proud of this young Italian talent, so famous throughout the world"

"Among musicians, I had a true friend, Maestro Cantelli. He was a young man of particularly noble sentiments."

"He had a clear gesture and beautiful hands, he knew how to firmly control the orchestra and get what he wanted. He didn't need to imitate anyone because his artistic personality was confident and convincing."

"He is one of the greatest conductors."

"[T]he 23 and 24-year-old Guido Cantelli was prepared to sacrifice his life for the moral outrage he felt towards the fascist and Nazi regimes. Speaking personally, I have never been so tested; really, very few (if any) of us have. I stand in awe of his moral strength and conviction. This is my definition of a hero."

"Cantelli was indeed one of the most prodigiously gifted conductors of his generation."

"[F]rom the youngest age Guido imitated his father by “waving his arms about”, and by the age of 10 he was, on occasion, conducting his father’s band."

"[Guido Cantelli,] the gods' lad."

"A few Precepts that are ready and at Hand, are much more profitable to us, than whole Volumes hat over-charge the Memory, and leave us at a Loss where to find them, when we have Occasion to use them. He that knows what belongs to his Salvation, has learned what is sufficient."

"I never found humanity, in the human instruments around me, so hopelessly wicked, so unworthy of consideration, or so barren of noble minds in lowly station, as it is customary to represent it; to engage, if possible, all the generous and good-hearted to love and esteem each other, to become incapable of hating any one; to feel irreconcilable hatred only towards low, base falsehood; cowardice, perfidy, and every kind of moral degradation. It is my object to impress on all that well-known but too often forgotten truth, namely, that both religion and philosophy require calmness of judgment combined with energy of will, and that without such a union, there can be no real justice, no dignity of character, and no sound principles of human action."

"Comprehensive books are very useful in the hands of those whose minds are already formed ; but experience has taught us that a judicious parsimony proves more successful in encouraging the mental efforts of young beginners, amid the many difficulties arising from the giddiness natural to their age, as well as from the number of their scholastic duties."

"Only the young men who sat under him could know his fascination as a teacher."

"As a composer, he enriched violin music by his numerous concertos and sonatas, and by a few dainty songs. However, it is as a virtuoso and as the founder of modern violin playing that Viotti will be remembered."