Sociologists From Italy

"The courage to educate, which is so greatly needed, lies precisely in the ability to take away, not to add."

"Happiness is like a train without a timetable: one comes along every now and then. You cannot predict its arrival, nor know when it will leave again. Your job is to go to the station."

"My profession has taught me that the most difficult and improbable thing is to change. Yet the pursuit of happiness lies not in preserving, but in the courage to change the course of events."

"If you give a child everything, you take away what is essential: desire, the fundamental feeling needed to build passion."

"Indignation is a fierce picklock, a lethal weapon precisely because it arises from oppositional thinking, from special consideration, from an analytical evaluation of what one intends to criticize. It is not a bazooka, but a sharp and astonishing foil. It takes courage to be indignant."

"Loneliness sometimes has unexpected, surprising colors and nuances. It is an empty room where your soul and your sensitivity resonate."

"The idea that happiness is a ‘'ready-to-wear’' feeling, easy to find, generates a very low threshold of antibodies against boredom, induces emotional satiety, and this entails, in the medium term, an enormous risk for young people: emotional emptiness, sensory detachment from reality, the absolute denial of desire and passion. (p. 15)"

"As long as Western man lived in poverty, he needed to know that he was not alone, and the network of relationships and mutual dependencies was a necessity; but as soon as development distributed some small economic privileges, complicity and solidarity—that is, the awareness that alone we are nothing—became obsolete words, symbols of submission, relics of a time that must be erased from the present, in which the most radical self-sufficiency is exalted. And with it, the never truly dormant sense of one's own superiority."

"When art is purely an aesthetic exercise, it is boring and mediocre. Art, representing the human condition, must be disturbing."

"Never give up on the idea that happiness can't be found for you somewhere in the world. Don't even do it on the last day of your life, because there will always be someone close to you who needs to glimpse it in your eyes."

"Unhappiness is a swamp where only surrender and renunciation dwell."

"Identity, including national identity, is therefore a much broader and freer concept than what many today prefer to tailor for themselves and, claustrophobically, decline. It does not indicate rigidity, but a perpetual flow."

"The task of a psychiatrist is to accompany growth, to accompany pain and not erase it; if anything, they must try to ensure that the damage is not repeated, that it does not sprout a weed that infests one's entire existence."

"It is love that acts like a disease, but it works in reverse: it is good when it infects, it kills when it heals."

"However, there is a happiness linked to eroticism that does not necessarily involve the sexual act. The sense of pleasure and ecstasy, for example. Ecstasy evokes an extraordinary, astonishing image. It means ‘being outside’, the feeling one experiences when one manages to detach oneself without resorting to the repression of one's condition. (p. 81)"

"True travelers are not rich people but curious ones. They are not looking for comfort, but for novelty and surprises."

"Thinking up and broadcasting a program means contributing to the construction of the culture and language of the younger generations, so television cannot exempt itself from playing a primary role in education."

"I see a great desire for conformity around me. Young people have breathed this air and tend to reproduce what adults have been developing for some years now: an antagonism towards anything that smacks of risk. And the bad thing is that many young people are likely to apply this to their life plans."

"A teacher does not train; they educate and elevate."

"Love, just like passion, is anticipation, unlimited trust, wonderful madness, a living and disruptive fire."

"On the other hand, I have always thought that the profession of teacher is not and should not be a job for just anyone: a civilized community should know this."

"Good ideas in education cost nothing, except the courage to have them and want to implement them."

"Sex and sexuality have been tools through which man has sought happiness. Since common morality has allowed us to engage in sex without love, the belief has spread that it represents a piece of Eden within everyone's reach. In reality, the frantic search for pleasure at all costs has taken something away from the knowledge of our identity, precisely through the trivialization of eroticism, now reduced to free genital exercise. This has led to the erosion of a complex idea of human eros, which should not only not be flattened to the necessity of reproduction, but also not simplified and reduced to a mere meeting of cells, a banal hormonal issue. This is also because genital happiness is among the most ephemeral and leads to premature melancholy. (pp. 79-80)"

"Newspapers, websites, and television keep us up to date on events that seem to plunge our community back into a primitive age. Clearly, we have modernized, but we have not become civilized."

"Happiness lies in the courage to challenge oneself, to demand something from one's destiny without letting it run its course without our contribution. (p. 66)"

"There is a psychological problem, not a legal one: you are mothers, and I don't need to tell you that those nine months are not just a matter of biological growth. There are thousands of studies that show that an emotional bond is established between the mother and the baby in her womb. [...] Women who ask others to carry on with the pregnancy for them? Horrible, Nazism, pure Nazism. You talk about the rights of adults and not the rights of children."

"(About Romanzo criminale) It contributes significantly to helping people not to think, to turn their attention to other things, and that is why the literary and then cinematic product is successful."

"We must give children back their playtime, not put smartphones in their cribs to distract ourselves. I am tech-savvy and in favor of technology, but not as a tool to relieve us of our responsibility for education. Andrea Camilleri wrote a wonderful book a few years ago, L'enciclopedia dei giochi per l'infanzia (“The Encyclopedia of Children's Games"), and Sicily, in its essence, could be a great pedagogical laboratory that bucks the trend. I say this about Sicily, but I could say it about Venice or Naples, about all those places that have an immense cultural heritage."

"The success of these television series, like all films about the mafia or evil in general, can be explained by one simple fact: they attract us because each of us is somehow drawn to evil, but they comfort us and lull us to sleep because they are fiction."

"We are experiencing a strange paradox: no one can say they are lonely anymore, yet we all, to some extent, feel and fear that we are."

"[...] it happened in Veneto, one of the most productive and wealthy areas of the country, in what has been called the engine of Italy. It did not happen in a suburb of the South, catalogued with the usual blah-blah. [...] It is proof that violence and prejudice against women have nothing to do with what the usual four sociologists say. Here we are in the heart of the Northeast. There are villas, well-kept gardens, a world we thought was privileged. And happy. But no. We have money, but not happiness. There are young people who cannot distinguish between feelings: how can you talk about love when you make forty phone calls to a girl?"

"They are wrong to always justify their children. Are the kids doing badly at school? Poor things. Do they get a failing grade? It's the teachers' fault. Do they fail? Appeal to the TAR. We have created children who do not know frustration, who do not know that ‘no’ also exists."

"I'm not a magician, but I don't think it all happened that night; outbursts only happen in comic books. You don't become a wolf overnight."

"People need guidance, and when they can't find it, they invent it. We need an instruction manual for life. But then the instructions are so simple and obvious that one wonders: why don't people follow them? We're not talking about Einstein's insights here."

"Instead of playing with toy trains in the attic, he plays with satellites orbiting the Earth. He's as brilliant as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Now it seems to me that something is making him a little too euphoric... But when a man, from Caesar onwards, passing through Napoleon, thinks he wants to take over the world, at that precise moment he becomes something I don't like: a dictator. Sooner or later, some actor will re-enact the scene of Charlie Chaplin kicking the globe, this time dressed not as Hitler but as Musk."

"(About the television program Belve) What's interesting about it? They've never invited me, and I would never go. Fagnani may be cute, but it's the fault of those who make the program that they have to look for the time you slipped on a banana peel: pure desperation. And teenagers see that we are ruthless. The trash TV we talked about years ago was the precursor to this; now it's animalistic television, in fact they're called “Belve” (Beasts) and “Iene” (Hyenas). There's nothing human about it."

"At the beginning of my career, I was too drastic and perhaps I didn't understand that there's an age for everything. I can afford to do certain things today because I see them from a higher hill, which allows me to broaden my view of things and bring a little more wisdom to bear. I am sometimes criticized for my excesses, my hyperactivity, and I think that criticism is fair, even if in the end it has brought good things, because otherwise I would be just one of many today. And then they accuse me of being blunt, of often taking too clear-cut positions: that too must come with life. I was born to have opinions, but at a certain age, you reach a point where you can speak your mind."

"I am afraid of the life my daughter will have. I can count young people who are great travelers on the fingers of one hand. No one cares that you went to Peru: they're much more interested in someone who takes a selfie with a heart-shaped pout. Today, artistic expression has been reduced to zero, unless you consider dipping a biscuit in your latte to be art, perhaps tagging the bakery so you can get free cappuccinos for the next three months."

"Rudeness in the age of the Internet and technology seems to know no bounds: everything seems to be permitted, respect for others is now an obsolete concept, a habit of old gentlemen resting in some country cemetery."

"Seduction begins with a mole, or rather a difference, something that distinguishes uniqueness. The actresses who have left an indelible mark on our memory are those who had some small flaw: feminine (and masculine) perfection leaves no impression and causes no disturbance; it may work for a photograph or an advertisement, but not for the construction of a myth."

"And if tomorrow our children can finally live in a world where a computer can be absolutely competitive with human intelligence, what will be their task and their destiny? To control megacomputers or be controlled by them?"

"A young talent, however innovative and creative they may be, if they remain isolated, even if connected to the world in a virtual way, will never be able to express themselves as those who have daily opportunities for real contamination."

"Parents need only ask themselves one simple question: if a boy or girl has never wanted for anything, how will they know the need to build something for their own future?"

"All children have talent, as Maria Montessori said, but not all are creative in the same way. To nurture their creativity, we need to make them confident in their abilities and not dependent on anything: a very difficult task for any educator."

"Digital technology is, and must remain, a tool, not an end in itself. With regard to the anthropological changes it constantly proposes, we need to speak words of wisdom and assert common sense. Technocrats are citizens like everyone else, not emperors of the new world."

"Friendship arises from life's opportunities, often from fate, but to become an indispensable feeling, it needs to be based on shared emotions, not emotional mediocrity."

"Friendliness applied to teaching has a relaxing effect on teachers, as it makes them feel magically irresponsible: authority is tiring and must be constantly reaffirmed, while this decadent form of equality requires no effort."

"Hold your head high and don't set limits on your ambition: limits are there to be overcome through passion and ability. It's not true that you have to accept yourself in life; rather, it's essential to know that you can improve yourself, whatever season you're going through."

"Each of us has the right to think that life is a long road, where you can and must try, make mistakes, and try again."

"The tendency to avoid experiences of fatigue and pain influences all forms of emotion. This leads straight to the most terrible form of anesthesia: indifference."