All Quotes

"Profound thoughts in a light-hearted soul, that was Franco. You could see it in his face, because even his features matched: a large, high forehead, a compact face that would break into a slight but sincere smile at the slightest thing, eyes that sparkled behind his glasses. He was like that even at Pigafetta High School in Vicenza, a year ahead of us in '53. We would bump into each other during break time and, amid the flood of nonsense, jokes and silly pranks, he stood out because he was smart. He was the prototype not of a good student, but of a boy who had something extra: I never thought of Franco as a nerd, far from it: he was sociable, witty, and sharp in the unwitting contests of intelligence. You found yourself listening to him naturally: you were silent and he spoke, making Giuseppe Faggin's beautiful lessons even more digestible."

"Plotinus devoted himself to the methodical task of transforming the direction of studies so that it corresponded to the greatness of the empire and its current problems. To this end, he started again from Plato and the interpretation of Plato; instead, he proposed Aristotle and his method as a subject of study and discussion. When Gallienus, who had recognised him as Caesar, rose to supreme power, he also had the authority and character of official teacher of the empire's philosophy. ('La vita e l'opera di Plotino, “'The Life and Work of Plotinus”', V, p. 37)"

"The historical position of Iamblichus was constantly debated: to some of his judges he seemed greater than his time and his academic position; to others, including Zeller, he appeared inferior to his fame. His originality lies in having believed that the religious inspiration of the Neoplatonic school was of decisive or fundamental importance for the development of doctrine. Therefore, in having sought to innovate it by drawing on the tradition of syncretism, esoteric priesthood, and mystical passion. (La scuola di Giamblico, “'School of Iamblichus”', XXX, p. 186)"

"(Iamblichus) He is a priest before he is a philosopher, and he loves oracles, legends and revelations as an intuitive starting point for philosophical ideas. This gave him a character that was both mysterious and superstitious, which differs from that of the usual Greek philosophers, just as the importance given to the doctrines of the Chaldeans and Babylonian science differs from their method; while in this he is similar to the practice of the Gnostics. However, reading the treatises he composed reveals a very clear mind, a profound thinker, who in his exhortation to philosophy (composed in emulation of an early treatise by Aristotle) achieves a high level of awareness of the history of philosophy and poses and resolves concepts that are not insignificant in the context of Neoplatonism. (“'School of Iamblichus”', XXX, pp. 186-187)"

"Iamblichus set out to give a systematic and decisive character to Plotinus' dialectic at its most sublime but also most obscure moment, that of absolute unity and its forms, already dealt with by Amelius and Porphyry; that is, around the way of reconciling and harmonising the mystical theory of the One with the variety of unitary principles that are expected to preside over the various aspects of life: that is, the transcendent One and the immanent One, the unity of thought and being, thinking thought and thought thought, and finally thought as an intelligible world. (La Scuola di giamblico, “'School of Iamblichus”', XXX, p. 187)"

"The thought of Proclus towered over the entire philosophy of his time as the last great system of Greco-Roman speculation, and offers our thought the dual value of the most elaborate solution to all problems, not only of the Neoplatonic school but of classical philosophy and the form in which it communicated almost immediately to Christian thought in the Middle Ages and the modern age. (Le scuole neoplatoniche, “'The Neoplatonic Schools”', XXXVII, p. 222)"

"The dialectical method developed by Proclus triumphed in modern philosophy in the form of Hegelian dialectics. Proclus considers the world of thought in reality to be entirely dominated and interpretable by the process of the One as outlined in metaphysics; therefore, for him, metaphysics is logic. The fundamental categories and ideas are identified, and everything is continually reduced to a single thought, which is that of unity. (Le scuole neoplatoniche, “'The Neoplatonic Schools”', XXXVII, p. 222)"

"Neoplatonic philosophy finds in Proclus the satisfaction of a systematic need of an analytical and deductive nature, while the form of the systematisation proper to Plotinus's Enneads was instead methodical-didactic; therefore, in the history of Neoplatonism and the Alexandrian school, it must be admitted that the full historical awareness of the value and significance of the school came precisely from this philosopher. (Le scuole neoplatoniche, “'The Neoplatonic Schools”', XXXVIII, pp. 228-229)."

"Nobody should be held in a cage because they're poor. Detention should be based on objective evidentiary factors, like whether the person is a danger to the community or a flight risk — not how much money's in their pocket. ... It's so obvious to any person who spends even a small amount of time thinking about any of this stuff that there's absolutely no reason to even have pre-trial detention in these minor cases. There's no reason why someone should be held in jail for a week or even four days for not having a leash on their dog or a headlight being out or driving with a suspended license. There's no reason why an arrestee should be held in jail because he's poor in one of those cases, and there's no question that any of these people are dangerous to the community."

"Copaganda … is the system of government and news media propaganda that promotes mass incarceration, justifies the barbarities and profits that accompany it, and distorts our sense of what threatens us and what keeps us safe."

"A lot of individuals would always bring you down. But I say this because I was able to experience this, I was able to battle this by giving myself positive affirmations such as 'I am worthy', 'I am capable', and 'I can do anything through my power and through my own voice.' That's what every individual should do to have their own self-worth."

"Copaganda … is the system of government and news media propaganda that promotes mass incarceration, justifies the barbarities and profits that accompany it, and distorts our sense of what threatens us and what keeps us safe."

"Copaganda is any news story that uncritically advances a police department's image or helps undermine reform efforts."

"What exactly does copaganda get wrong?"

"Copaganda is a very particular type of propaganda that is designed to get people to support the punishment bureaucracy system as it's currently constituted in this society. One major function of copaganda is that it wants to narrow our conception of harm to only those types of harms that the police and prosecutors and courts deal with. So, for example, copaganda focuses us on certain types of interpersonal harm such as shoplifting, burglary, robbery, murder, the kinds of crimes that the police are likely to arrest people for and patrol for. But it doesn’t steer us toward much more significant types of harm such as water pollution crimes or air pollution crimes, which both kill orders of magnitude more people in this country every year than all murder combined. [...]"

"... one of the most offensive, grotesque things about copaganda and about the current media system is that it is pointing us toward all of the wrong solutions. We have the most heavily incarcerated, heavily policed, and heavily surveilled society that we’ve ever had. And it is not reducing the amount of interpersonal violence in our society. It does not work. The police do not prevent these shootings."

"Ultimately, copaganda sustains a grip on our collective imagination to imagine a world without police. [...] In a carceral system that is systematically death-making and grief-denying, debunking copaganda is life-affirming."

"(About Giorgio Gaber and Sandro Luporini) They were free from labels and classifications, far removed from the laziness of common discourse. By “renaming”, they forced us to take a step forward. Towards a world that must be rediscovered, as the ‘Canzone dell'appartenenza’ (Song of Belonging) said. Towards reasons that have been lost or dissipated, towards a clarity made opaque by the standardisation of thought."

"Gaber and Luporini [...] attempt to achieve a clear understanding of the transformations of which they are both observers and participants. And the desire that drives their attempt is, of course, to communicate this understanding to an audience. Which, in the context of a theatrical event, means first building an audience."

"Our relationship with truth has something to do with our relationship with each other and with the world."

"The neutrality of sociometry conceals a precise ideology: psychology is thus in a typical situation of “objectification” and of a loss of intentionality and meaning in its theoretical operations and practices; it provides a typical example of the “forgetting of meaning” referred to by Husserl in “The Crisis” [...] The need for a genetic investigation that reveals the intersubjective root of neurosis, reacting to the “solipsistic” danger of psychoanalysis, remains the most interesting and valid aspect of Moreno's research. [...] The intersubjectivity that Moreno wishes to assert in diagnosis and therapy reveals itself to be an abstract intersubjectivity, or, as we would say in phenomenological language, unfounded."

"Concrete subjectivity must be able to use its expressive techniques in their entirety: gestures, words and body movements are the appropriate tools for this therapeutic process. Moreno considers the body to be an “'organ d'expression, porteur d'intentions”'."

"Reading and rereading these pages by Robert Nozick we can feel that “'his”' philosophy accompanies us, with luminous intelligence, sensitivity and friendship, in “'our”' examined life."

"The individual, whose fundamental characteristic for Moreno is spontaneity-creativity, aligns himself with the role: when a conflict arises, more or less consciously, between the subject and the role, between the individual and the given model, illness, anxiety and neurosis arise."

"(With the COVID-19 pandemic) We have gone from a city [Milan] that fed on its own light, conquered with Expo, to this desert that invades, as Stefano Boeri would say, its squares. We are in the “'Wasteland”' of Eliot."

"I am convinced that the theory of contemporary democracy must respond to the dilemmas that arise in a changed world, which is simply our own. And I wonder what interpretation of democratic freedom is most appropriate for this purpose, if this purpose is shared. The question now is this: what grammar of freedom, in times of internal unrest within democracy and external hostility towards democracy?"

"In the now extensive and equally varied literature on animal rights, Tom Regan's book [...] occupies a special and prominent place. “'The Case for Animal Rights”' is one of the few attempts to systematise and formulate a broader philosophical theory within which arguments in favour of moral reasons take on their specific meaning. These arguments support, inform and dictate what should be the right treatments, actions, institutions and social practices that involve and affect the relationships between us, human animals, and our fellow travellers in the adventure or odyssey of evolution, non-human animals. (p. 7)"

"Inaugurated in 1975 by Peter Singer“s famous pamphlet, ”'Animal Liberation“”, philosophical research into our duties towards animals, the moral rights to be ascribed to them, how it is right to treat them, and which practices — economic, scientific, technological—are consistent with the principles of a normative ethic that includes among its “clients” the grandchildren of Bentham and Kant as much as those of Fido or Pluto, is now vast. (p. 7)"

"Many women and men participate in movements whose main purpose is to minimise suffering and cruelty and to maximise respect for and protection of animal rights. They take a stand against institutions and practices dictated by cruelty or injustice. (p. 8)"

"Tom Regan's book is a passionate, rigorous and accurate philosophical attempt to formulate a comprehensive normative theory that sheds the most lucid light on the reasons that militate in favour of treatments, practices and institutions modelled on (and consistent with) the principle of equal respect due, for strict reasons of justice, to our fellow travellers on earth, non-human animals. (p. 9)"

"I believe that thoughtful men and women, willing to examine the issues of their own lives and those of our fellow travellers on earth, should in any case be grateful to philosophers such as Tom Regan for their commitment, scientific integrity and passion for something that has to do with what we can still call, in our forms of communal living, possible “progress” in ethics. (p. 12)"

"The more women try to assert themselves as equal to men in dignity, value and rights, the more men react violently. The fear of losing even a few crumbs of power makes them vulgar, aggressive and violent. [...] These are men who do not accept female autonomy and who, often out of weakness, want to control women and subjugate them to their will. Sometimes they are insecure and have little self-confidence, but instead of trying to understand what exactly is wrong in their lives, they blame women and hold them responsible for their failures. Gradually, they turn women's lives into a nightmare. And when women try to rebuild their lives with someone else, they seek them out, threaten them, beat them, and sometimes kill them. Paradoxically, many of these crimes of passion are nothing more than a symptom of the “decline of the patriarchal empire”. As if violence were the only way to avert the threat of loss. To continue to maintain control over the woman. To reduce her to a mere object of possession. But when the person you love is nothing more than an object, not only does the relational world become hell, but love also dissolves and disappears."

"As those who identify moral dilemmas and try to resolve them by advancing moral principles, values and norms know well, every dilemma, by definition, is dramatic, desperate and hopeless. When faced with a moral dilemma, one always makes the wrong choice; whatever decision one makes, one always ends up regretting what one has said or done. :*From a speech to the Chamber of Deputies, 9 July 2013, quoted in Chamber of Deputies – XVII Legislature – Stenographic Report of the Assembly – Session No. 49 of Tuesday, 9 July 2013 – Continuation of the discussion of the bill: Conversion into law of Decree-Law No. 61 of 4 June 2013, containing new urgent provisions for the protection of the environment, health and labour in the operation of businesses of national strategic interest (A.C. 1139-A)“”."

"Every day must pass in such a way that in the evening we can say, “Today we loved more than yesterday”. Only in this way can we live, Giulia, only in this way can we think, only in this way can we grow. (p. 28)"

"It is not work, however, that kills and destroys; what kills and destroys is the exploitation of labour, the exploitation of poverty, the exploitation of despair, that is, everything that happens when the only thing that matters is the maximisation of economic profit, that absolute selfishness that no longer has anything to do with the well-understood interest that Adam Smith already spoke to us about and that leads to the maximisation of the common good."

"There are moments of profound misunderstanding that happen just like that, from one moment to the next, sometimes suddenly. Whether it is due to accumulated fatigue, a momentary lapse of attention, or simply because life is often very complicated. But ultimately, the exact reasons for this misunderstanding matter little. Let's just say it happens."

"(About the surrogacy) [...] when we are faced with a pregnancy that is altruistic, when we have clarified the difference between the principle of the non-commercialisation of the human body and its intangibility, we must also recognise, at this point, the principle of female autonomy. When a woman decides clearly, autonomously and altruistically to help a couple become parents, having already been a mother herself, having already carried a pregnancy to term, having no particular financial needs, in the name of what should we victimise her and consider that she is incapable of freely expressing her consent?"

"Unfortunately, this law is already outdated. It is a law that would have been excellent twenty years ago. It is a law reminiscent of the PACS in France, voted on in 1999. It is a law from which we should have expected more."

"[...] I will obviously vote yes to this law because it is a necessary step forward, it is needed. Now those who dare to even imagine that being homosexual means not only being different, but also being inferior to others, will be even more ashamed. [...] I ask for no triumphalism [...] because what I would like to ask on my own behalf of all homosexual people, alas, my gay brothers and lesbian sisters, is to apologise for not having been sufficiently capable of protecting and defending their equal dignity and their complete, equal and full equality."

"If a party is unable to uphold a basic principle such as equality between children, regardless of their parents' sexual orientation, then it is no longer a party with which one can identify."

"I have no victories in Parliament. I have pushed things forward as far as I could. For example, I was the rapporteur for the law on double surnames, which then stalled in the Senate. I got it voted on in the Chamber of Deputies despite hostility and objections that I didn't think would come from the left. A macho, paternalistic, archaic attitude."

"When you are a simple member of Parliament, there is always a group leader, a deputy group leader, a chamber secretary, who block you with their authority. And you can't go any further."

"It used to be easier to be a know-it-all, but now the world is so complex that anyone who claims to be a know-it-all is a poor soul."

"The French anthropologist Claude Lévy-Strauss, in his book “'The Look from Afar”', devoted memorable pages to the theme of racism, explaining the fundamental difference between xenophobia and the legitimate need for anyone to protect themselves. It is one thing to want to protect one's loved ones, one's habits, one's beliefs and, why not, one's job."

"The “forever” of love is like the “forever” of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland: it lasts a second. (chap. 1)"

"The “right person” is not the one who will be able to calm our anxieties and fulfil our expectations, but the one who will learn to accept us as we are, with our flaws and contradictions. Even when we ourselves find it hard to bear. (chap. 3)"

"In love, as in life, you should never have too high expectations. Perhaps you shouldn't expect anything at all, since the most beautiful things always happen unexpectedly. (chap. 4)"

"Love cannot be earned. Otherwise, it would not be love. It would just be a form of barter: I give you what you ask for and you give me what I ask for. (chap. 4)"

"And it is precisely when you are no longer afraid of losing your loved one that love dies. (interlude I)"

"Feelings need privacy. Because when you reveal too much, you empty yourself. And then there is nothing left for yourself. Nothing to hold on to when evening falls and you need to rediscover that hard core that makes you unique, that reassures you. Love for life. Love for ourselves. Love for others. (chap. 12)"