Carlo Donat-Cattin

"There is a profile that stands above the political one, and that is the moral profile."

"[In 1986] [...] Juventus is a bit like the Christian Democracy party: even when it plays badly, it is always at the top, a little lower, a little higher, but always at the top."

"In recent times, Giovanni Goria has been traveling all over Italy with his traveling theater troupe to promote the biggest deal around today: the 200 trillion lire pie that concerns the health and social security sectors and is tempting to the large private groups that manage insurance companies, namely the Agnelli, Ferruzzi, De Benedetti and Berlusconi families. Goria has been traveling around promoting the merchandise. Sometimes I saw the liberal De Lorenzo with him, the man who is now Minister of Health. :*‘’"Goria propagandista d'affari‘’, ‘'La Stampa’', August 12, 1989."

"The country will have to face great sacrifices, and great sacrifices are accepted when one is guided, in having to make them, by high moral dignity. It is that strength that Alcide De Gasperi had in leading Italy out of defeat and toward democratic reconstruction."

"Democratic balance is also marked by the fact that, on the one hand, financial power controls the levers of the market economy, while on the other hand, the masses, having achieved universal suffrage, can obtain, through parliamentary representation, civil rights and therefore social rights, the welfare state."

"(About Arnaldo Forlani) We will not be late today. We must allow the secretary to go to the Pope. At least for a blessing: he needs it. In every respect."

"As Minister of Labor, he completed, with the approval of the Workers' Statute, a reform that would enhance the role of trade unions and which, in his opinion, would mark the completion of the system of constitutional freedoms in our legal system."

"The then Minister of Labor did not conclude negotiations with the metalworkers until I agreed, after several hours of resistance, to rehire a hundred workers who had been responsible for violence. I remember that, blackmailed by these conditions, I agreed to the rehiring. And the humiliation was not in accepting, or suffering, this form of blackmail, but in returning to Turin and informing the factory production managers that I had given in and that they had to rehire these hundred violent workers. That was the beginning of ten disastrous years of brutality and violence in the factory, which was only corrected after more than three thousand days."

"His lifestyle had the rare strength of a fundamental choice: the capacity for contradiction."

"His intransigence always had popular roots and connections. Alien to secular temptations, freed from instrumental conventions, he strove toward far-reaching ideals. A clear religion. His lesson: never give in."

"A man who has constantly fought to maintain a strong link between institutional structures and the needs of the world of work."

"A life characterized by a refusal to compromise. He paid a heavy price for this conception of political dignity; he was not always understood, and many friends turned their backs on him."

"I once told him, “You're gruff even when you say thank you.”"