Academics From Italy

"Can I link Luca di Montezemolo and Pope Benedict XVI? Both condemn ethical relativism, understood as the transfiguration of the Italian art of getting by, looking out for oneself and disregarding the common good."

"From a political and social point of view, I am against any discrimination against gay people. But morally, I think it is wrong. However, there are many things that are morally wrong but which the law should not prosecute."

"He has the unbearable pretension of appearing to be a philosopher when he is, at most, a professor of philosophy."

"Mani Pulite began as a simple police operation in a case of bribery. Thanks to a fortunate combination of circumstances and the intelligence and tenacity of Judge Di Pietro, it developed into an investigation involving an entire political class. The mechanism that had protected the system of corruption until then had two pillars. The first was the belief that everyone did it and that therefore the laws had essentially fallen into disuse and only fools still felt bound by them. The second was the certainty that if, by chance, someone fell into the clutches of the law, powerful friends would protect them or, at least, compensate them. Antonio Di Pietro and his colleagues succeeded in subverting these two pillars."

"As a Roman Catholic, I consider homosexuality a sin, but not a crime. Mine is a moral position that does not affect the rights that must be recognised for all."

"Children who only have a mother and no father are the children of a not very good mother. And children who only have a father are not children, because a man alone can make a robot. But he cannot make children."

"Silvio is great. We do not regret the good things we have done with him, but he is the past, let's say it loud and clear. The country can no longer hold out and needs someone to show the way to the future."

"We are writing to you with a request to improve the quality of life in the Senate. The refreshment bar does not serve ice cream. We believe it would be useful to do so and we are certain that this reflects the wishes of many. Would it be possible to arrange this?"

"I'm better at wooing than Berlusconi: I can prove it to you."

"(About Silvio Berlusconi) The Prime Minister has a terrible fear of women. Jokes, vulgar remarks and sports bar comments are just a way of avoiding any real engagement with that world. But the more someone acts like a bully, the more they try to reduce women to sex objects, the more it shows that they feel insecure and unable to handle the situation."

"I haven't changed my opinion on gay people. Politically and legally, I am in favour of non-discrimination, but morally, I think what the Catholic Church thinks: homosexuality is a moral disorder. If God gave you a male body, you can never be a woman. You can never get pregnant. And pretending to be something you are not makes you feel bad; you lose your life in exchange for a fiction."

"By signing the motion of no confidence in the Berlusconi government together with Bossi, Buttiglione has shown himself to be a double-dealing fool."

"Those who attack the judiciary do so to find themselves an alibi... The primary enemy is corruption."

"My party is called Popolare (People's Party) and I believe that the people still hold Christian values, including “thou shalt not steal”, which is one of the commandments. People saw Di Pietro as the embodiment of these values that we in the Popolare Party seek to represent, so it goes without saying that I would be delighted if Di Pietro were to join us."

"Di Pietro appeared to be someone capable of enforcing the law against bullies, a bit like Robin Hood."

"Berlusconi cannot act as a prophet of bipolarism, preaching rules that God has revealed only to him and that authorise him to contravene the rules of the Constitution. The Constitution is what it is. Berlusconi thinks that elections are held and that votes are like shares that can be put away. Instead, the people elect members of parliament, and they are accountable to the voters, not to Berlusconi."

"In conclusion, I would like to remind posterity – but we all know this because it is written in the history books – that Mr Buttiglione was rejected as European Commissioner by the European Parliament because of his countless statements, defined by the European Parliament as discriminatory against homosexuals. Buttiglione's words and statements over the years regarding homosexuals are not linked to ideological reasons, but to personal reasons."

"Perhaps the most extreme form of protest among young people is silent protest. It is the protest of those who accept nothing but reject nothing either, because they do not claim to have the criteria to reject and cannot determine precisely the object of their rejection, so they remain radically perplexed. Their negativity is total, but at the same time they are aware that they cannot express themselves without contradicting themselves.[...] Nothing is accepted and one “searches”. One searches with the awareness of one's complete disorientation: a disorientation so great that it does not even allow for its explicit expression. [...] It is the metaphysics of emptiness that is converted into the metaphysics of searching, which is increasingly fuelled by the search itself, illuminated by all the lights of a particularly broad and profound experience. And it is a metaphysics that reaches the level of a radical need, such that it invests all of today's reality and tends towards that exhaustive answer that every conscious metaphysics proposes. (from “La protesta dei giovani”, pp. 92-93)"

"One need only follow the usual manifestations of the ruling class, the speeches of its most representative figures, the appeals of the highest authorities, to realise the emptiness of their words and the coldness of their souls. There are still those who are capable of massive faith in the values they have been brought up with, but most are already far removed from them and continue to extol them because they are incapable of replacing them. Thus, the gap between the generations is not even mitigated by esteem and affection for those who believe sincerely, and the detachment of young people takes the form of explicit condemnation. (from “La protesta dei giovani”, p. 85)"

"If the crisis of today's society is a metaphysical crisis, its solution must be metaphysical in nature, and silence today can truly express the awareness of the problem as a problem of the whole. (from “La protesta dei giovani”, p. 93)"

"The social revolution now taking place on the international stage consists precisely in the transition to a scientific and technical solution to common problems. Politics is receding into the background as a remnant of a tradition that must be overcome. (from “Introduction”, p. 32)"

"[...], if in economics abstract socialism means a capitalist State that differs from the Nation, and if liberalism means a capitalist individual whose interests also differ from those of the Nation, then fascism or corporatism will mean the negation of all state and individual capitalism and the coincidence of State and Nation through the corporation."

"The world of politics is coming to an end because there is no one left who can aspire to formulate and implement programmes inspired by a precise and achievable ideal. The world is breaking away from utopia and is guided by forces whose composition no one can scientifically anticipate. The history of the twenty-five years is a clear demonstration of the impossibility of continuing to pursue messianic mirages, which no one can any longer fantasise about, let alone translate into reality. (from “Introduction”, p. 37)"

"The main focus of Boutroux's thinking revolves around the problem of science and the meaning of natural laws. From 1874, the year of his thesis, De la Contingence des lois de la Nature (On the Contingency of the Laws of Nature), until his death, a little less than half a century, Boutroux developed and elaborated his critique of science, always insisting on it and basing his theories on freedom and religion, which form, one might say, the positive part of his philosophy."

"In the continuous development of nature and spirit, Boutroux believes it is impossible to establish anything definitive that has eternal value. Man, therefore, who is the greatest exponent of progress, does not know what his progress is tending towards; he does not know, therefore, whether his progress is true progress. Everything disappears into the indefinite, into confusion, and a sceptical conclusion seems inevitable. But no: Boutroux, like James before him, does not lose himself in negation at this point, but seeks to save himself from scepticism. And so negation itself is transformed into affirmation. It is precisely the indistinct, the confused that has within itself the reason for life: in it is love, faith, the ideal: in it is that powerful impulse that moves the poet, the artist, the scientist himself, for science would be nothing without faith. But religion thus attained is an empty religion, and the ideal thus posited is an ideal that fades into nothingness."

"Through the process of unification, everything that is distinctive must necessarily tend to fade and disappear. Only what has common value is destined to become more pronounced and an object of faith. It is precisely this fact that clarifies the current conflict between generations. The values in which fathers believe are still regional ones, and the values to which their children are drawn are those of a world in the process of unification. An in-depth analysis of what characterises the current common life of peoples allows us to understand the move towards an increasingly undifferentiated conception and practice. What is destined to prevail is what is recognised as valid by all, and everything that corresponds to particular traditions can only be saved if it manages to become an accepted part of the common discourse. (from “La protesta dei giovani”, pp. 81–82)"

"Francesca Albanese is the good"

"Albanese's campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated."

"While political leaders and governments shirk their obligations, far too many corporate entities have profited from Israel’s economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and, now, genocide."

"Israel commits crimes like it breathes. The only way to protect not only Palestinians, but also Israelis, is to stop it. It is a threat to peace and security."

"Italian, French and Greek citizens deserve to know that every political action violating the int’l legal order, weakens and endangers all of them. And all of us."

"There are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide against Palestinians as a group in Gaza has been met."

"The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group."

"I don't know if you heard about Francesca Albanese (..) US shoud apply sanctions against her. She shouldn't be allowed entering the United States of America. She comes once a month to promote hate, to go to universities, and you know she compared our prime minister Netanyahu to Hitler; and she compare your president to orrible leaders. That's unacceptable and I expect the new administration to be stronger on this issue."

"I do believe that the ICC arrest warrants constitute a historical decision. It is the first time that (these are against) leaders who are considered Western, because Israel is part of the Western bloc … It is important to advance the application of international law, especially when there are atrocity crimes."

"I will not give time to people who use the label of antisemitism to attack those who criticise Israel for its appalling human rights records – those people are not concerned with addressing real antisemitism, which is something that very much exists and is revolting."

"I call for these top EU officials, and others, to face charges of complicity of war crimes over their support for Israel’s 19 month of assault on Gaza. This cannot be met with impunity."

""... the regenerative arrival of the Portaluppis, the Gio Ponti." (Carlo Emilio Gadda)"

"It is the handles that open the doors of my environments to dreams."

"Of all my past passions, of all the varied tendencies, of all the colorful fixations, of all the eclectic manias, I will speak of everything except the most comprehensive and complete art, the art I have always cultivated and adored, but which I have always vilified and mistreated: 'Mother Architecture'."

""Piero Portaluppi represents a significant and exemplary part, in its elegance, of Milanese architecture between the two world wars." (Antonello Negri)"

"All architecture is geometry, in dreaming, in thinking, in representation, in translation, in realization, in completion."

""Thus my great-grandfather Piero Portaluppi made Milan less austere, but the death of his son destroyed him." (Piero Maranghi)"

"It is relevant to establish whether the investments in people and resources the Indus civilization would deserve should compare with those directed in the past to the study of ancient Mesopotamia and, more recently, pre-Columban Meso-America."

"Cavalli-Sforza and his team state that “Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene [=10000 to 3 mya] southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions since the Holocene [=c 10000 to present]. The phylogeography [=neighbouring branches] of the primal mtDNA and Y-chromosome founders suggest that these southern Asian Pleistocene coastal settlers from Africa would have provided the inocula for the subsequent differentiation of the distinctive eastern and western Eurasian gene pools”"

"The Como people... went to Lierna, where they were terrified by seeing its inhabitants appear, they hid in the mountain woods, the Como people burned their beautiful tower crowned with green laurel, after having put its defenders to flight away."

"I don't believe that the representative democracy can be put into crisis by authoritarian movements like those of the twenties and thirties. There is however the danger that in the western democracies the forms of democracy are kept up without the substance. Political parties won't be banned any longer, civil liberties will be guaranteed to a certain extent but, at the same time, there could be the danger that only the formulas of democracy remain and the substance disappears."

"Italo Pizzi, Epic tales from the book of kings of Firdusi, Ermanno Loescher, 1877"

"Although he was a Muslim of religion and although he had to live in times, in which of the ancient and glorious Persia only the name remained, he could, however, he alone, understand all the glory and the inherient and warlike nature of his homeland. (p. 123)"

"The religion of the Vedi for the Indians and that of Homer and Hesiod for the Greeks was but the expression of the ideas of the people, often subject to change and contradict each other because they were never fixed or determined by any sacred book of the nature of the Bible or of the The Iranian religion is on the contrary the work of philosophers and priests, founded, he is true, over the popular idea of the continuous struggle between good and evil, but reduced in a system by elected and speculative minds and confirmed with a sacred code, immutable, which was said to be revealed by Ormuzd to his prophet Zarathustra or Zoroaster. (p 26)"