Gianni Vattimo

"It is a matter of [...] shifting the focus of knowledge towards what I would call an ethical emphasis: the subject is the subject of life, behaviour, moral feelings – and here the “subject” should also be understood in a passive sense, whereby the self experiences sensations, actions and feelings for which it is not itself responsible, which occur within it and belong to it but are not originated by it, to which it is subject, in fact. So perhaps “active” and “passive” are no longer opposed as we are accustomed to thinking, and the subject-passivity is that paradoxical subject that withdraws but continues to be the intrusive yet necessary tenant [...]."

"I am a marxist, a leninist and I don't even consider disagreeable Stalin, who saved us from Hitler, more than the United States."

"Cecchi Paone is a kind of right-wing aunt. I don't dislike him. I don't like him, but not because he's right-wing. If Robert Redford were right-wing, I'd still like him. Cecchi Paone, honestly... I don't even like Rizzo . But when Rizzo's name comes up in gay clubs, everyone."

"Well, if I hadn't been gay, I would never have embarked on this profound reflection on the non-normativity of natural essences, which constitutes the soul of weak thought. So, even if it's not a particularly gay philosophy, I believe there are important connections."

"My mother was a widow and I am gay, but I know many other children of widowed mothers who, despite the absence of their fathers, did not become gay. After all, I am convinced that almost anything is better for a child than an orphanage. Nor can one pursue the perfect family balance. It is enough that the adoptive parents are normal, civilized people, not sadists who cut up children, and that they have an income to support them, without necessarily having to be part of the Agnelli family."

"Opposing homosexual families is only possible in the name of a philosophical belief about the natural essence of the family itself. This cannot be professed by a lay state."

"I grew up as a Catholic militant; when I was a boy I used to read authors like Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier and novelists like Bernanos. But Catholic inspiration led me also to read authors that were heretical to the modern tradition. I didn’t like rationalistic historicism that came from Enlightenment, peaking in Hegel and Marx."

"Those who rail against relativism are not addressing us as individuals, who are not and can never be relativists—since perhaps only God can truly be so, looking down from above on the plurality of cultures and interpretations. Relativism can only be a feature of society, since it is within society that multiple worldviews coexist and often clash. Would eliminating the vice of relativism not simply mean doing away with liberal society?"

"Just as Western literature would be unthinkable without the Homeric poems, without Shakespeare, without Dante, so our culture as a whole would be meaningless if we were to cut Christianity out of it."

"Thank to God I am uncertain, or even an atheist – not an idolater, not truth-dependent... And then, an existence full of certainty, how boring. A bit like the traditional Paradise: tota simul ac perfecta possessio. But please. Instead, what? Open historicity, which is the true meaning of creationism. We are not manifestations of a geometrically demonstrated structure; the rationality we encounter in the world is only a “fact”, a contingent, historical product, which, as such – with our experience of choices, alternatives projects with successes and failures – of ex-sistence, that is – attests to the contingent, free nature of my origin. I call God the act of original freedom from which my freedom comes, and which I certainly cannot prove with the five Thomistic ways or with any other deductive method. Even Descartes does not prove it. And Immanuel Kant can only imagine eternal life as a continuation of the struggle for good, that is, as history."

"The paradoxical fact is that it is precisely the passion for truth, conscience, in its search for the truth, that has come to undermine itself: it has discovered, in fact, that it is just a passion like any other."

"The tradition of the Catholic Church is based on keeping the faithful under terrorist threats. The story of Eluana Englaro shows that the Catholic Church as an institution cannot be reformed; it deserves only to be destroyed. We are witnessing the final madness"

"Even if we have to think that the Higgs boson has nothing to do with God, it is nevertheless true that discoveries such as today's have a powerful impact on our lives, on our worldview, and therefore also on our religiosity. It is a kind of effect that we can only call “neutralizing” with respect to our lived history. How can we compare the few millennia of human history with the endless horizons of geological eras, the formation of the physical cosmos, and, indeed, the minutes following the Big Bang?"

"Eco is one of the few people I recognize as being more intelligent than me. They don't give him the Nobel Prize only because they already gave it to Dario Fo. But he's sly, he identifies too readily with his social persona as a sacred monster, a national monument. And I get pissed off with him when I see him hanging out with the people from “Libertà e Giustizia” (Freedom and Justice), which is a kind of Red Cross committee. These are balanced gentlemen who are unlikely to be seen in their smocks in Piazza San Giovanni shouting at Berlusconi."

"Stalin imposed the development of heavy industry against agriculture and thence the displacement of people, the sacrifices, the deaths... A crazy dream! But... without the Stalinist industrial force, the Nazis would have won!"

"Soviet communism and Western capitalism share the same crazy ideology: forced industrialization of society."

"I am Christian, therefore I am communist. The first Christian communities were very communist... except that they were expecting the immediate end of the world."

"I propose hermeneutic communism: non-dogmatic communism, weak communism. Only this can save us. [Is is] without essences, without absolutes to be realized at all costs. It is only an ideal of equitable society, a society that progressively weakens violence like dialectics."

"Someone said that it is important — you cannot live without it — exactly because it is useless. As Heidegger put it in a famous sentence: "Science doesn't think" — precisely because it is useful, it works toward goals that it doesn’t choose. In Kantian terms, science deals with phenomena, factual data that it receives according to reason’s frames, organizes them in time and space, expresses them mathematically, connects and measures them in various ways. But Kant says that there is the noumenon beyond the phenomenon: what you can think but is phenomenologically unknown. It is part of what Kant calls the "Kingdom of Ends". In this kingdom you encounter freedom; that is something impossible to know phenomenologically. The same goes for the existence of God. In philosophy, there are higher questions that usually don’t have an answer because they do not concern phenomenal data, the way science does. This is the source of a peculiar feeling of uselessness and void-ness about philosophy. But we cannot live without it if we don’t want to become machines or robots."