Women Journalists From Italy

"[...] (Abou the Italian Family Day) I took part because I believe the family is a part of humanity's heritage that deserves protection: the family is neither right-wing nor left-wing; it belongs to universal values."

"Pope Benedict XVI is an excellent theologian and an outstanding pastor."

"[...] We European women need to start a real discussion about what immigration is bringing to our countries; about the hardship, and about the very real threats to our physical safety that we experience on the streets, on buses, and in our city neighbourhoods."

"Indeed, the Protocols have served many dictatorships, and they continue to cause harm to this day. Those pages make it clear what intellectual poisoning actually consists of: the idea that the world is not a collective creation, but merely a canvas woven by the Few and the Powerful. This concept denies the role of individual human agency in shaping history; therefore, it also denies any principle of transparency and trust, without which there can be no human community."

"Lucio Dalla's funeral is one of the most striking examples of what it means to be homosexual in Italy: you go to church, they let you have a funeral, and they bury you with a Catholic service, as long as you don't say you're gay. It's a symbol of who we are: there's permissiveness, as long as you look the other way."

"(About Adriano Celentano) [...] He has the right to say what he wants, and I would have defended him even if he had said that gay people should be sent to concentration camps."

"I remain an atheist and a Marxist, but I have the utmost appreciation for Catholic culture."

"(About Cardinaletti's reaction when she was offered the job of presenting La Domenica Sportiva) What did I do when I found out? I organised a conference call with my parents and my brothers, Michelangelo and Raffaello, who live in Canada and Perugia. I felt perplexed and excited. And scared, of course."

"Interviewer: What do you think when I say the word "tomorrow"? Cardinaletti: It's a bit like saying ‘what's around the corner’, to quote a master. I've often thought about it: around the corner for me there's a restaurant. Tomorrow, maybe a new adventure."

"When I was a child, I always spent my holidays in Senigallia, where we moved in the summer. I have vivid memories of that time. My paternal grandmother, the loudspeaker that started broadcasting at 11 a.m. and 5 p.m., which was the signal for us children that we could go swimming, and evening walks along the seafront. It was a holiday resort, not a holiday. It was a time of great freedom."

"(About football) It's the belly of the country. There are all kinds of footballers, I don't see them as angels or demons, but as professionals who believe in their dreams."

"My favourite musical style is that of Armando Trovajoli, I would listen to it at every moment of my life. I follow the latest trap music with curiosity. But in the end, I always prefer Celentano, Battisti, Ivan Graziani, Tenco. De André, Mina and Dalla are the absolute podium; without them, my life would have been infinitely more miserable. But I also spent my entire adolescence in the myth of Leonardo DiCaprio."

"I am grateful to my parents for letting me travel. I went to Thailand when I was little. And every year I treat myself to a Thelma & Louise-style holiday with my mum. The best one was in Oman."

"It's not that I cook a lot... I mostly just eat. In fact, a man can win me over with food. I still adore my mum's lasagne. Lasagne makes me feel at home..."

"I continue to live as simply as before. I still feel a bit like a daughter of La Califfa, the nickname given to me by Bevilacqua himself when I told him that my parents went to see his film on their first date."

"My father has always had a music and record shop, my mother is a biologist and works in food hygiene."

"I really like both going out to do the services, and preparing the news. These are two equally fascinating aspects."

"Journalism was born "man". Women have managed to assert themselves and certainly there has been no lack of authoritative female signatures. However, I think that to have a female director requires further evolution."

"A cute girl, when she makes a mistake, is more easily subject to criticism. Now it is a problem that I no longer ask myself, I try to give my best and be as professional as possible. Then the physical aspect is certainly a good business card for the world of TV, but it goes into the background."

"The positive aspect is that it is a job that varies from day to day. Events and news are always new. Then it is a great advantage to combine work and passion."

"The fact that I can tell stories not only by writing them but also by living them through a character and therefore giving the public emotions (possibly positive), which is the ultimate goal of entertainment."

"My film is called Never Children [in Italian, Bambini Mai] because they have no chance of living as children. If they go outdoors, there are shootings, drug-related crimes of every kind, and a network of pedophiles operating in that neighborhood. There were 12 cases in the last two years, and two children died because of that. It’s just a nightmare of a place for someone to be a child."

"I want to find a job to be proud of. One of those jobs you're standing up to at four in the morning because you don't feel like quitting."

"The Church no, I do not like it. [The Pope] intervenes in politics, in things that do not concern him. He did damage that could not be worse than this."

"He is not a Pope, he is a theologian. I do not like him. He has no humanity. It has pissed off the whole Islamic world."

"Politics is something you choose. And you also choose your lifestyle. But you don't choose your belonging to a class."

"Mussolini insists on keeping the memory of her grandfather high. Impossible business. She would do better to distance herself, both politically and humanly."

"There is no limit to evil, but Bossi is the limit of what can be ugly in the world."

"It is clear that in my life there are contradictions. There is a contrast between my work life and my family life and that of my partner. Whoever criticizes me has his reasons. I cannot have credibility in the eyes of everyone, but in the end, I am more normal than I look.... The altered reality, the yacht, is much photographed, as well as formal situations in which I accompany Pierre because I’m his partner and should be at his side. But then there is another reality that no one tells. I never go out, I’m always at home in the evening. I have dinner, watch a movie, and go to sleep. If Pierre is not there, it is mostly my friends who keep me company. And I live in Milan, not Monte Carlo."

"This is where the Mafia stockpiles heroin for basically the whole of Europe. It is the place drug dealers go to buy drugs, not normal people. The life of children there is insane. They get recruited very early on, when they are 12 or 13. They turn into lookouts, hide drugs, transport drugs and there is absolutely nothing that saves them."

"Worst case scenario — they slap you and break your camera. It’s not really a life-threatening type of situation. It’s not as though all of a sudden it’s super-dangerous. You know what you’re doing and then you decide to take the risk or not. Last year I didn’t want to take too many because I was pregnant."

"He sails on the GC32s, the fastest boats in the world that are the same boats used in the America’s Cup. Now he’s opened a medieval combat club so he does medieval combat. In the end, we look at each other and say, ‘We’re just going to have to accept who we are and pray.'"

"I remember that when on Anno Zero, [Michele] Santoro chose Beatrice Borromeo, beautiful and blonde, they all criticized her. She was not human that could be [beautiful and] intelligent too. Today, after graduating in Italy and in two months at Columbia University, if they do not to say congratulations, a dignified silence, at the very least."

"It's been four years since I spoke about Islamic Nazism, the war with the West, the cult of death, the suicide of Europe. A Europe which is no longer Europe but Eurabia, which with its softness, its inertia, its creed and its enslavement to the enemy, is digging his own grave. (Sono quattr' anni che parlo di nazismo islamico, di guerra all' Occidente, di culto della morte, di suicidio dell' Europa. Un' Europa che non è più Europa ma Eurabia e che con la sua mollezza, la sua inerzia, la sua cecità, il suo asservimento al nemico si sta scavando la propria tomba.)"

"If you put a pistol against my head and ask which I think is worse, Muslims or Mexicans, I'd have to think a moment, then I'd say the Muslims because they've broken my balls."

"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon... I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

"Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense."

"Our weakness in the West is born of the fact of so-called "objectivity." Objectivity does not exist. The word is a hypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: Sometimes truth stays on one side only."

"The first thought a Western woman has when she arrives in a rigorously Muslim country like Pakistan is that she appears to be the only woman to have survived a tsunami that has washed away all the others."

"Americans," she said, repeating for me something she told the , "you have taught me this stupid word: cool. Cool, cool, cool! Coolness, coolness, you've got to be cool. Coolness! When I speak like I speak now, with passion, you smile and laugh at me! I've got passion. They've got passion. They have such passion and such guts that they are ready to die for it."

"People like me who have passion are derided: 'Ha ha ha! She's hysterical!' 'She's very passionate!' Listen how the Americans speak about me: 'A very passionate Italian.'"

"What's the point anyway — Of suffering, dying? It teaches us to live, boy. A man who does not struggle does not live, he survives."

"I also saw the cement-quarry where a couple of days earlier the Muslims had massacred eight hundred Hindus. Many women included. And where their corpses lay abandoned to the appetite of the vultures. Hundreds and hundreds of vultures unrolling long paper-streamers which were not paper-streamers: they were the Hindu bowels torn out by their beaks and carried up in the sky. Yes, I rediscovered that world in Dacca."

"Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam. And Italy is an outpost of that province, a stronghold of that colony...In each of our cities lies a second city: a Muslim city, a city run by the Quran. A stage in the Islamic expansionism."

"My heart is also tightening for the way in which they have killed them [the Buddhas of Bamiyan]... They have not acted with the irrationality and bestiality of the Chinese Maoists who destroyed Lhasa in 1951, broke into monasteries and into the palace of the Dalai Lama and like drunken buffalo razed to the ground the monuments of a civilization... The destruction of Lhasa was not preceded by a trial... But in the case of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, there was a real process. There was a real sentence, then an execution was decided based on legal norms or presumed legal norms. It was therefore, a premeditated crime."

"I have informed myself better about Buddhism and I found that, unlike Muslims, with their an-eye-for-an-eye and a-tooth-for-a-tooth, and unlike Christians who speak of forgiveness but invented Hell, Buddhists never use the word "enemy". I have found that they have never made converts with violence, they have never made territorial conquests through the pretext of religion, and they don't have the concept of Holy War. Some deny this. They deny that Buddhism is a peaceful religion... Each family includes people of bad character. But even they recognize that the bad character of those warrior monks was not used to proselytize, and admit that the history of Buddhism does not record a ferocious Saladin or popes like Leo IX or Urban II or Innocent II or Pius II or Julius II... Yet the children of Allah also fight the Buddhists. They blow up their statues, they prevent them from practising their religion."

"There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape."

"I am not speaking, obviously, to the laughing hyenas who enjoy seeing images of the wreckage and snicker good–it–serves–the–Americans–right. I am speaking to those who, though not stupid or evil, are wallowing in prudence and doubt. And to them I say: "Wake up, people. Wake up!!" Intimidated as you are by your fear of going against the current—that is, appearing racist (a word which is entirely inapt as we are speaking not about a race but about a religion)—you don’t understand or don’t want to understand that a reverse–Crusade is in progress. Accustomed as you are to the double–cross, blinded as you are by myopia, you don’t understand or don’t want to understand that a war of religion is in progress. Desired and declared by a fringe of that religion, perhaps, but a war of religion nonetheless. A war which they call Jihad. Holy War. A war that might not seek to conquer our territory, but that certainly seeks to conquer our souls. That seeks the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization. That seeks to annihilate our way of living and dying, our way of praying or not praying, our way of eating and drinking and dressing and entertaining and informing ourselves. You don’t understand or don’t want to understand that if we don’t oppose them, if we don’t defend ourselves, if we don’t fight, the Jihad will win. And it will destroy the world that for better or worse we’ve managed to build, to change, to improve, to render a little more intelligent, that is to say, less bigoted—or even not bigoted at all. And with that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morals, our values, our pleasures...Christ! Don’t you realize that the Osama Bin Ladens feel authorized to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, because you don’t wear your beard long or a chador, because you go to the theater or the movies, because you listen to music and sing pop songs, because you dance in discos or at home, because you watch TV, wear miniskirts or short–shorts, because you go naked or half naked to the beach or the pool, because you *** when you want and where you want and who you want? Don’t you even care about that, you fools? I am an atheist, thank God. And I have no intention of letting myself be killed for it."

"To make you cry I’ll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered "Allah akbar, Allah akbar." Yes, I know: the ancient Romans, those ancient Romans of whom my culture is so proud, entertained themselves in the Coliseum by watching the deaths of Christians fed to the lions. I know, I know: in every country of Europe the Christians, those Christians whose contribution to the History of Thought I recognize despite my atheism, entertained themselves by watching the burning of heretics. But a lot of time has passed since then, we have become a little more civilized, and even the sons of Allah ought to have figured out by now that certain things are just not done. After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don’t believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn’t even what I want to underline. It’s that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah–akbar, Allah–akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones."

"Maybe they [women who were executed by the Taliban] were guilty of the worst of all crimes: to laugh. Yes. Laughing. I said laughter. Didn't you know that with the Taliban in Afghanistan women can't laugh, that they are even forbidden to laugh?."