Musicians From Italy

"[Hai un mito, una persona che ammiri più delle altre, con la quale ti piacerebbe collaborare?] Non ho un mito in particolare, mi piacerebbe collaborare con qualsiasi persona che riesce ad esprimere la propria creatività attraverso ciò che sente nel cuore e nell'anima."

"Nella vita l'errore insegna ad affrontare il proprio destino."

"Siate corretti, umili e sinceri: stupirete il mondo."

"Voglio fondermi con te, sino a diventare unicità."

"Gli eventi inaspettati accadono... sempre."

"Tutto ciò di estremamente importante ti è stato già donato: si chiama vita. Fanne buon uso."

"Ama osare, osa rischiare. Sempre."

"La musica mi tiene in vita. (March 17, 2019, h 07.35))"

"[Parlaci dei tuoi inizi, come nasci artisticamente?] Come ho detto in precedenti interviste, non c'è un punto d'inizio ben preciso, è una passione che nasce con me, è nel mio DNA e mi viene tutto magistralmente facile. Poi, come tutti ho iniziato in feste private con gli amici e quando suonavo i dischi di altri artisti e la gente si esaltava, ho pensato quanto sarebbe stato bello se queste emozioni la gente le potesse provare ballando e ascoltando delle mie canzoni!"

"[I 3 aggettivi per definire il tuo sound?] Allegro, emozionante e travolgente."

"[Come nascono le tue song?] Le mie song nascono dal nulla, spontanee, niente di studiato a tavolino, di solito è di notte che l'ispirazione mi porta delle buone idee... magari sono in qualsiasi punto del mio studio e canticchio, canticchio e poi esclamo: "Mmm carino questo motivo...". Se la mattina seguente il motivetto mi rimane in mente allora vuol dire che ha delle potenzialità! Il passo successivo è quello di buttare degli accordi con la tastiera e registrare una demo con la mia voce, sulla quale poi lavorarci tranquillamente."

"[Cosa pensi della pirateria musicale?] Uccide la musica! Quindi, tutto ciò che è pura emozione."

"[Dotato di una bellissima voce, quando ti è venuta l'idea di interpretare il lavoro di doppiatore?] Durante l'età adolescenziale... realizzavo piccoli comunicati delle mie serate insieme alla mia ex compagna Clara, anche lei, dotata di una bellissima voce."

"[Come nasce Carlo Prevale DJ?] Già all'età di 7 anni ero appassionato di musica e vari rumori, prodotti con ogni tipo di tamburo autocostruito con secchi vuoti di vernice. Registravo musicassette dalla radio chiamando il conduttore."

"[Ricordi la tua prima serata come DJ?] Sì, ricordo perfettamente la mia prima serata come DJ. Era nel 1999 nella discoteca Green Club di Monte Livata. Ricordo la tensione di un adolescente di 16 anni e della sua paura di sbagliare. La pista era piena, la consolle era in una cabina sopraelevata, sapevo di avere una grande responsabilità e ce la misi tutta."

"[La richiesta musicale più strana che ti hanno mai fatto?] In piena serata un uomo del tutto ubriaco mi chiese un Cha Cha Cha gridando ad alta voce "Mi sento gay!"."

"[Qual è la musica che prediligi nei tuoi set?] Amo molti generi di musica e soprattutto non faccio una selezione in base all'anno di uscita. "La musica è senza tempo, un bel brano di ieri è bello oggi e sarà bello domani"."

"[Qual è il disco che più ti rappresenta?] Non ce n'è uno in particolare che più mi rappresenta, qualsiasi disco che produco, compongo, remixo o seleziono mi rappresenta."

"When music speaks, everybody understands."

"I don’t want to stay in a place that calls itself a Jewish community but is the propaganda office of a government. I am against those who want to ‘Israelianize’ Judaism."

"Art possesses the formidable tool of . Take, for instance, theatre. Theatre, by convention, agrees to be fake; thanks to this convention, which is innocuous, it can tell the truth. Art can tell the truth, because it is a transfigured language which doesn’t claim to possess divine truth; with its ability to transform relationships, it can address even the most terrible issues, exploring them without being destroyed by them. But artists have to be conscious of their role."

"I feel that the end of my days is drawing near; my senses are failing me; my delight and strength in creating songs are gone; he, who was once honored by half of Europe, is forgotten; others have come and are the objects of admiration; one must give place to another. Nothing remains for me but trust in God, and the hope of an unclouded existence in the Land of Peace."

"[Salieri] did not harbor a grudge against Mozart, who eclipsed him; but whenever he spotted a weak point in Mozart he drew his students' attention to it. Thus one day, when I was alone with Salieri, he divulged that Mozart had completely misinterpreted the final scene of the first act in "Titus." Rome is burning; the whole population is in revolt; the music ought to rage and be tumultuous; but Mozart chose a slow, solemn tempo and rather expressed dread and horror. I did not let Salieri confuse me, and still agree with Mozart's views. As far as I know, Salieri missed only one performance of "Don Juan." This work must have interested him particularly; but I have no idea whether he ever commented about it enthusiastically."

"Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and “gives the whole show away.” The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden."

"There is no modern science in Machiavelli, but the Baconian idea of the conquest of nature and fortune in the interest of humanity is fully present. So too are modern notions of irreversible progress, of secularism, and of obtaining public good through private interest. Whether Machiavelli could have had so grand an ambition remains controversial, but all agree on his greatness—his novelty, the penetration of his mind, and the grace of his style."

"We would like to believe that Machiavelli's insights can be retained and his extremism discarded, that his notion of esecuzione can be absorbed into the modern liberal constitution without the tyrannical requirement of uno solo that may give us a shiver or may merely seem quaint."

"Between being loved and being feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless."

"TANTO NOMINI NULLUM PAR ELOGIUM"

"There is really very little of Machiavelli's one can accept or use in the contemporary world. The one thing I find interesting in Machiavelli is his estimate of the prince's will. Interesting, but not such as to influence me. If you want to know who has influenced me most, I'll answer with two philosophers' names: Spinoza and Kant. Which makes it all the more peculiar that you choose to associate me with Machiavelli."

"The cool cynicism of Machiavelli's teaching is impressive. Not only does he recommend to princes absolute unscrupulousness; his advice is based on the assumption that all their subjects are gullible and guided solely by self-interest. Some have been shocked by the book's immorality; others have found its lack of humbug refreshing. Few, however, have been persuaded to admire the models held up by Machiavelli, such as Pope Alexander VI and his son Cesare Borgia."

"The jury is still out, but what Machiavelli described—either to recommend or subtly denounce it—was a diplomacy without conscience. It may look brilliant, but many who commented on Machiavelli noted that hidden in his works is the idea that a diplomacy totally separated from morality and conscience may achieve results occasionally but in most cases, and in the long run, would not work. …However we decide to read him, Machiavelli listed as the three features of effective diplomacy caution, art (meaning the mastery of a number of technical tools), and above all patience."

"If one desires to learn at one blow, to what degree of hideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the distance of centuries, let him look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact. And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.."

"In attempting to teach the prince how to achieve, maintain, and expand power, Machiavelli made his fundamental and celebrated distinction between "the effective truth of things" and the "imaginary republics and monarchies that have never been seen nor have been known to exist." The implication was that moral and political philosophers had hitherto talked exclusively about the latter and had failed to provide guidance to the real world in which the prince must operate. This demand for a scientific, positive approach was extended only later from the prince to the individual, from the nature of the state to human nature. Machiavelli probably sensed that a realistic theory of the state required a knowledge of human nature, but his remarks on that subject, while invariably acute, are scattered and unsystematic."

"Perhaps the most influential book ever written on the characteristics of men in politics is The Prince, by the great Renaissance Italian Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). Despite its enduring popularity, fascination, and authority it is extremely one-sided and unsystematic."

"Machiavelli's Discourses is full of examples of men who by exceptional boldness (and cunning) rescue situations which on any conventional view would be hopeless. Indeed, Machiavelli makes a "theory" out of all this in The Prince—that Fortune is female, and is most likely to fall in love with brave men."

"In Machiavelli, for instance, courage is the highest expression of man's virtù; and virtù is above all man's civic spirit, his disposition to be active for the common good, or, more specifically, for civic glory and greatness."

"For Machiavelli, courage is the highest expression of virtù, and virtù is the possession of whatever qualities are needed "to save the life and preserve the freedom of one's country.""

"Machiavelli is the first important political realist... The three essential tenets implicit in Machiavelli's doctrine are the foundation-stones of the realist philosophy. In the first place, history is a sequence of cause and effect, whose course can be analysed and understood by intellectual effort, but not (as the utopians believe) directed by "imagination". Secondly, theory does not (as the utopians assume) create practice, but practice theory. In Machiavelli's words, "good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good counsels". Thirdly, politics are not (as the utopians pretend) a function of ethics, but ethics of politics. Men "are kept honest by constraint". Machiavelli recognised the importance of morality, but thought that there could be no effective morality where there was no effective authority. Morality is the product of power. The extraordinary vigour and vitality of Machiavelli's challenge to orthodoxy may be attested by the fact that, more than four centuries after he wrote, the most conclusive way of discrediting a political opponent is still to describe him as a disciple of Machiavelli. Bacon was one of the first to praise him for "saying openly and without hypocrisy what men are in the habit of doing, not what they ought to do"."

"At a certain stage in my reading, I naturally met with the principal works of Machiavelli. They made a deep and lasting impression upon me, and shook my earlier faith. I derived from them not the most obvious teachings [...] but something else. Machiavelli was not a historicist: he thought it possible to restore something like the Roman Republic or Rome of the early Principate. He believed that to do this one needed a ruling class of brave, resourceful, intelligent, gifted men who knew how to seize opportunities and use them, and citizens who were adequately protected, patriotic, proud of their State, epitomes of manly, pagan virtues. [...] But Machiavelli also sets side by side with this the notion of Christian virtues – humility, acceptance of suffering, unworldliness, the hope of salvation in an afterlife – and he remarks that if, as he plainly himself favours, a State of a Roman type is to be established, these qualities will not promote it: those who live by the precepts of Christian morality are bound to be trampled on by the ruthless pursuit of power on the part of men who alone can re-create and dominate the republic which he wants to see. He does not condemn Christian virtues. He merely points out that the two moralities are incompatible, and he does not recognise an overarching criterion whereby we are enabled to decide the right life for men. The combination of virtù and Christian values is for him an impossibility. He simply leaves you to choose – he knows which he himself prefers. The idea that this planted in my mind was the realisation, which came as something of a shock, that not all the supreme values pursued by mankind now and in the past were necessarily compatible with one another. It undermined my earlier assumption, based on the philosophia perennis, that there could be no conflict between true ends, true answers to the central problems of life."

"What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for tearing off hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too) but that when they assume that the two ideals are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as the existentialists call it, or of “false consciousness,” to use a Marxist formula) which their actual behavior exhibits. Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality—the hypocrisies of ordinary life—but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values. His own withers are unwrung. He has made his choice. He seems wholly unworried by, indeed scarcely aware of, parting company with traditional Western morality."

"When Machiavelli advises the Prince to carry out the Machiavellian scheme of action, he invests those actions with no sort of morality or beauty. For him morality remains what it is for everyone else, and does not cease to remain so because he observes (not without melancholy) that it is incompatible with politics. ... For him evil, even if it aids politics, still remains evil. The modern realists are the moralists of realism. For them, the act which makes the State strong is invested with a moral character by the fact that it does so, and this whatever the act may be. The evil which serves politics ceases to be evil and becomes good."

"We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do. For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with the columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent; his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil. For without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced. Nay, an honest man can do no good upon those that are wicked, to reclaim them, without the help of the knowledge of evil."

"He is the earliest conscious and articulate exponent of certain living forces in the present world. Religion, progressive enlightenment, the perpetual vigilance of public opinion, have not reduced his empire, or disproved the justice of his conception of mankind. He obtains a new lease of life from causes that are still prevailing, and from doctrines that are apparent in politics, philosophy, and science. Without sparing censure, or employing for comparison the grosser symptoms of the age, we find him near our common level, and perceive that he is not a vanishing type, but a constant and contemporary influence. Where it is impossible to praise, to defend, or to excuse, the burden of blame may yet be lightened by adjustment and distribution, and he is more rationally intelligible when illustrated by lights falling not only from the century he wrote in, but from our own, which has seen the course of its history twenty-five times diverted by actual or attempted crime."

"Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception."

"I am not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it."

"Politics have no relation to morals."

"It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver."

"The ends justify the means. (Variant: the end justifies the means)"

"When Machiavelli came to the end of his life, he had a vision shortly before giving up the ghost. He saw a small company of poor scoundrels, all in rags, ill-favoured, famished, and, in short, in as bad plight as possible. He was told that these were the inhabitants of paradise, of whom it is written, Beati pauperes, quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum. After they withdrew, innumerable serious and majestic personages appeared, who seemed to be sitting in a senate-house and dealing with the most important affairs of state. Among them he saw Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Plutarch, Tacitus, and others of similar character; but he was told at the same time that those venerable personages, notwithstanding their appearance, were the damned, and the souls rejected by heaven, for Sapientia huius saeculi, inimica est Dei.. After this, he was asked to which of the groups he would choose to belong; he answered that he would much rather be in Hell with those great geniuses, to converse with them about affairs of state, than be condemned to the company of the verminous scoundrels that he had first been shown."

"If you only notice human proceedings, you may observe that all who attain great power and riches, make use of either force or fraud; and what they have acquired either by deceit or violence, in order to conceal the disgraceful methods of attainment, they endeavor to sanctify with the false title of honest gains. Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty; for faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor; nor do any ever escape from servitude but the bold and faithless, or from poverty, but the rapacious and fraudulent. God and nature have thrown all human fortunes into the midst of mankind; and they are thus attainable rather by rapine than by industry, by wicked actions rather than by good. Hence it is that men feed upon each other, and those who cannot defend themselves must be worried."