All Quotes

"Please forgive my emotion, but for me, the decision you have made to elect a woman to the Presidency of this Assembly for the first time represents a responsibility that I cannot hide behind any formal preamble."

"The age of globalization offers opportunities and knowledge, but at the same time carries with it the risk of new forms of marginalization—a risk that cannot be ignored or underestimated, starting with the real economy and starting with the workplace."

"Vanessa Ifediora - Miss Lewis"

"And if you're gonna freak out every time that you see a frozen chicken, I think we should go to the hospital. I don't know anything about this."

"I am also here because I could no longer put up with the views of those who – in order to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the financial and media community – go so far as to describe the twenty-year period of fascism as "the absolute evil"."

"Fini disappointed me because he's afraid of women, because he doesn't believe in meritocracy, and because he makes you feel like he's the only intelligent person around."

"Silvio Berlusconi has no respect for women; his life shows this day after day. He told that young woman in precarious employment to marry a billionaire: that is not the solution to precarious employment. Voting for Silvio Berlusconi is the most pointless vote women can cast."

"(About Muhammad) He was polygamous; he had nine wives, [...] the youngest of whom was nine years old. He was a paedophile. [...] In our culture, he was a paedophile."

"What's the point of tapping a mobster while he's talking to his mother? It's an abuse of power."

"There is none so deaf as he who will not hear. Disclosing wiretaps that relate to an individual's intimate and private life, rather than to the criminal offences for which the wiretapping was ordered, constitutes an unacceptable violation of that individual's privacy and rights."

"We have left Silvio Berlusconi alone for too long in his denunciation of the 'iron axis' between judges and left-wing journalists. And we've left the journalists alone for too long. True journalists like Feltri, Belpietro, Ostellino, Ferrara, Fede and Rossella."

"(About Oriana Fallaci) [...] left to her own devices as she imagined a better world."

"(Regarding Gaddafi's visit to Rome) When a Head of State visits think we need to show the respect that we sometimes lack a bit: I don't know if there were acrobats, dwarves and dancers on that occasion, because I wasn't there, so I can't know."

"I do politics, and I am only willing to respond to political arguments. I've never made personal issues out of anything, never gossiped, and never resorted to backbiting."

"(Referring to Pier Ferdinando Casini) [...] if you try to be moderate at all costs, in the end you become modest."

"Even if they make mistakes, law enforcement officers are never murderers."

"(About Giorgio Napolitano) I think he's the worst President of the Republic ever."

"Who you gonna shoot, you or me?"

"Fuck my fucking ass."

"America and the world need Trump. This is a time for identity, for borders, for exclusion – not for panic-stricken inclusion..."

"Regarding the media reports about his business activities... Some newspapers are spreading huge lies, which is why we are going to file our own lawsuit for damages [...] I hope that in a few years' time, I will have a tidy sum, and that with my damages, I might be able to help someone who needs me more. (13 July 2023)"

"Berlusconi has allied himself with the worst kind of traitor, Gianfranco Fini."

"Fini has become a party functionary, like so many others."

"I'm not into grey tones; I'm all for black or white."

"The only thing that is certain is that Berlusconi has genuinely been persecuted."

"For a Catholic, absolute evil is the Devil, not Fascism."

"We need to condemn them harshly; all racial laws should be condemned. However, I would never say that fascism is absolute evil, because for me, fascism is not absolute evil."

"Fascism was a period in our country's history, and today, anyone who opposes the cultural hegemony of the left is labelled a fascist, so just think how many times I've been told I'm a fascist. I'm proud to be a fascist, because I'm in good company."

"To build my career, I've never made compromises; I've never given in – in other words, I've never sold out."

"I am one of the few female politicians in Italy who is not a tool of men. I am free and independent in my thinking. In fact, I think I'm more capable of using Berlusconi than the other way around."

"Berlusconi has given me several gifts: bracelets, necklaces and various tokens of affection on public holidays and on my birthdays. He is a generous man who cares about people; there are few like him. We are still friends. For a right-wing woman, this is a very important value, but unfortunately, Silvio has now descended into the political circus."

"Over the course of my career, I have been pursued by several women, and I am flattered by that."

"I've said it before, and I'll say it again: after what happened to little Yara, the judges should resign."

"If they had used the same resources and technology for the search as they did to investigate the Olgettina girls, perhaps Yara would still be alive."

"They took it out on the volunteers who were looking for that poor girl, when in fact they are heroes. They even accused the community of Brembate of maintaining a code of silence, without realising that people in the North Italy are like that – they keep their grief to themselves."

"Yara's community needs to know that even if they catch the monster, he'll only serve a third of his sentence, because we've basically forgotten about life imprisonment by now. Not to mention temporary releases – perhaps the first one to attend his father's funeral and the second to visit him in hospital, eh?"

"Everyone is calling for everyone to resign. Berlusconi over the Rubygate scandal, Bondi because a rotten wall collapsed in Pompeii, Rosi Mauro over the way she managed the Senate chamber, Calderoli..."

"Our individual freedoms – the privacy of our conversations, our post and our homes – are being increasingly curtailed. Nowadays, we're all worried about talking on the phone..."

"Daniela Santanché hates going out and going to parties."

"Something tells me that the team of Sallusti and Santanchè will prove to be more active, imaginative and dynamic than the team of Feltri and Belpietro. In any case, it will be interesting, given that Sallusti relates to Pavolini in the same way that Feltri relates to Badoglio."

"We need the TSO here; put a straitjacket on her."

"A "Naturfolk" learns by intimate contact with nature that there is a healing power in the flower and the grass, in the mountains and streams, in the rain and the clouds. He comes to see gods working in these phenomena, and if they are of divine origin do they not contain goodly qualities? Why seek afar for the divine? It is even in the objects around you. They are good and just. Why seek elsewhere for justice and goodness? So, to live a natural life is to be just and good. There is no evil in nature. What seems to be evil is the tipping of the balance scale. Evil is immoderation. All natural appetites are good and they become evil only when indulged in to excess. This is Shinto, the Way of the Gods, naïve primitive teaching aboriginal to the soil of Japan."

"Chivalry is a flower no less indigenous to the soil of Japan than its emblem, the cherry blossom; nor is it a dried-up specimen of an antique virtue preserved in the herbarium of our history. It is still a living object of power and beauty among us; and if it assumes no tangible shape or form, it not the less scents the moral atmosphere, and makes us aware that we are still under its potent spell. The conditions of society which brought it forth and nourished it have long disappeared; but as those far-off stars which once were and are not, still continue to shed their rays upon us, so the light of chivalry, which was a child of feudalism, still illuminates our moral path, surviving its mother institution."

"A typical samurai calls a literary savant a book-smelling sot. Another compares learning to an ill-smelling vegetable that must be boiled and boiled before it is fit for use. A man who has read a little smells a little pedantic, and a man who has read much smells yet more so; both are alike unpleasant. The writer meant thereby that knowledge becomes really such only when it is assimilated in the mind of the learner and shows in his character."

"Death for a cause unworthy of dying for, was called a "dog's death." "To rush into the thick of battle and to be slain in it," says a Prince of Mito, "is easy enough, and the merest churl is equal to the task; but," he continues, "it is true courage to live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die.""

"Pilgrimages to all sorts of uncanny places—to execution grounds, to graveyards, to houses reputed to be haunted, were favorite pastimes of the young. In the days when decapitation was public, not only were small boys sent to witness the ghastly scene, but they were made to visit alone the place in the darkness of night and there to leave a mark of their visit on the trunkless head."

"Tranquillity is courage in repose. It is a statical manifestation of valor, as daring deeds are a dynamical. A truly brave man is ever serene; he is never taken by surprise; nothing ruffles the equanimity of his spirit. In the heat of battle he remains cool; in the midst of catastrophes he keeps level his mind. Earthquakes do not shake him, he laughs at storms. We admire him as truly great, who, in the menacing presence of danger or death, retains his self-possession; who, for instance, can compose a poem under impending peril or hum a strain in the face of death. Such indulgence betraying no tremor in the writing or in the voice, is taken as an infallible index of a large nature—of what we call a capacious mind (yoyū), which, for from being pressed or crowded, has always room for something more."

"We needed no Shakespeare to feel—though, perhaps, like the rest of the world, we needed him to express it—that mercy became a monarch better than his crown, that it was above his sceptered sway."

"We knew Benevolence was a tender virtue and mother-like. If upright Rectitude and stern Justice were peculiarly masculine, Mercy had the gentleness and the persuasiveness of a feminine nature. We were warned against indulging in indiscriminate charity, without seasoning it with justice and rectitude."

""Bushi no nasaké"—the tenderness of a warrior—had a sound which appealed at once to whatever was noble in us; not that the mercy of a samurai was generically different from the mercy of any other being, but because it implied mercy where mercy was not a blind impulse, but where it recognized due regard to justice, and where mercy did not remain merely a certain state of mind, but where it was backed with power to save or kill."