All Quotes

"You're the top! You're the Great Houdini! You're the top! You are Mussolini!"

"[I]t is perhaps to Mussolini's credit as a human being that his nationalism was clearly heartfelt where Stalin's was undoubtedly a mere convenience."

"Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say "But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time.""

"Your figure is not just an Italian one. You are the apostle of the world campaign against dissolution and anarchy...Fascism...is a universal phenomenon that ought to conquer all nations...Fascism is a living Gospel."

"Yes, all Africa remembers that it was Litvinov who stood alone beside Haile Selassie in Geneva, when Mussolini's sons flew with the blessings of the Pope to drop bombs on Ethiopian women and children."

"The difference between the Italian railway service in 1919, 1920 and 1921 and that which obtained during the first year of the Mussolini regime was almost beyond belief. The cars were clean, the employees were snappy and courteous, and trains arrived at and left the stations on time — not fifteen minutes late, and not five minutes late; but on the minute."

"Mussolini accelerated the process after the conquest of Ethiopia (1935-6). The war in Africa was to provide a new context for Fascism’s scheme of social engineering."

"There seems to be no question that [Mussolini] is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy."

"I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman."

"The meeting between Chesterton and Il Duce occurred in 1929, ten years before the war, at a time when, whatever his other faults, Mussolini had reintroduced a mark spirit of optimism and freshness to an Italy that had formerly been pessimistic and stagnant. Throughout the 1920s, Chesterton thought he saw in the Italian leader qualities that might have offset certain evils in Britain. It is important to keep in mind that whatever the misreadings of fascism, Chesterton always had some quite specific British problem in view when he praises Mussolini."

"For Chesterton… British public rhetoric was more than a mere style: "The motive is the desire to disguise a thing even when expressing it." To his mind, the dictator's words, even if his actions were as bad or worse than those of the parliamentarians, were morally and stylistically superior. At least they said openly what was being done openly. The British rhetoric, for Chesterton, was one with the decayed British liberalism that allowed exploitation of workers by plutocrats who were never rebuked by government or the courts. If nothing else, Mussolini's language was a bracing alternative. Gazing back across the horrors of World War II, it is hard for us to imagine how good men like Chesterton, whatever their objections to British liberalism, could admire Mussolini, though several prominent intellectuals and politicians did. Many of us have family members or friends who fought or died to stop the fascist darkness, and we find it difficult to sympathize with Chesterton's desire to be fair to Mussolini. Mussolini's thuggish violence, of course, Chesterton and others rejected. But their admiration was an index of the scale of reform they thought needed."

"Some of the things Mussolini has done, and some that he is threatening to do go further in the direction of Socialism than the English Labour Party could yet venture if they were in power."

"[Mussolini was] farther to the Left in his political opinions than any of his socialist rivals."

"Roosevelt had no illusions about revolution. Mussolini and Stalin seemed to him ‘not mere distant relatives’ but ‘blood brothers.’"

"Mussolini told the young man of his admiration for Communism—‘Fascism is the same thing’ [as Communism]."

"So fell, ignominiously, the modern Roman Caesar, a bellicose-sounding man of the twentieth century who had known how to profit from its confusions and despair, but who underneath the gaudy facade was made largely of sawdust. As a person he was not unintelligent. He had read widely in history and thought he understood its lessons. But as a dictator he had made the fatal mistake of seeking to make a martial, imperial Great Power of a country which lacked the industrial resources to become one and whose people, unlike the Germans, were too civilized, too sophisticated, too down to earth to be attracted by such false ambitions. The Italian people, at heart, had never, like the Germans, embraced fascism. They had merely suffered it, knowing that it was a passing phase, and Mussolini toward the end seems to have realized this. But like all dictators he was carried away by power, which, as it inevitably must, corrupted him, corroding his mind and poisoning his judgment. This led him to his second fatal mistake of tying his fortunes and those of Italy to the Third Reich. When the bell began to toll for Hitler's Germany it began to toll for Mussolini's Italy, and as the summer of 1943 came the Italian leader heard it. But there was nothing he could do to escape his fate. By then he was a prisoner of Hitler."

"Not a gun was fired- not even by the Fascist militia- to save him. Not a voice was raised in his defense. No one seemed to mind the humiliating nature of his departure- being hauled away from the King's presence to jail in an ambulance. On the contrary, there was general rejoicing at his fall. Fascism collapsed as easily as its founder."

"Living in New York, she (Angelica Balabanoff) discovered support for Mussolini in some Italian-American and conservative circles before the United States entered World War II, and so she edited and wrote a small periodical, Il Traditore, which between January, 1942, and May, 1943, contained a series of articles describing Mussolini's early years, his persecution of socialists, and the fascist record of assassinations and brutality in Italy.""

"[Mussolini] brought a radical Marxist strand to the Avanti! newspaper, soon doubling its circulation. With a growing audience, Mussolini redoubled the urgency of his utopian propaganda; ‘private property is theft’ and should be abolished as Italy moved through the phase of collectivism forwards to the ultimate goal of communism."

"The Mussolini that now emerges is more intelligent, less tinsel and stage property than some had supposed, more than the mere gangster and bluffer that others have seen, on the whole a more sinister phenomenon for the student’s science of politics. Here is a real intellectual who has run the gamut of radical revolutionary ideas—anti-patriotism, anti-religion (not merely anti-clericalism), anarchism, bolshevistic communism in the Leninist sense, all genuinely and vehemently advocated—and has come out the simon-pure imperialistic despot, who uses throne and altar, brutal violence and fraud, to buttress his autocratic regime."

"Lenin was the contemporary politician whom [Mussolini] most admired and he studied the Russian revolution closely to see what lessons it offered. Lenin seemed to him ‘the very negation of socialism’ because he had not created a dictatorship of the proletariat or of the socialist party, but only of a few intellectuals who had found the secret of winning power. Mussolini was, in truth, envious."

"Mussolini had once belonged to the Bolshevik wing of the Italian Socialist party and still in 1924 confessed admiration for Lenin, while Trotsky was quoted as saying that Mussolini was his best pupil."

"[In 1938] Mussolini anti-clericalism was thus reassuring itself. Sometimes he now acknowledged that he was an outright disbeliever... [that] the papacy was a malignant tumor in the body of Italy and must 'be rooted out once and for all,’ because there was no room in Rome for both the Pope and himself."

"Mussolini had been envious of the bolsheviks and for a while fancied himself as the Lenin of Italy."

"Science is now in the process of destroying religious dogma. The dogma of the divine creation is recognized as absurd."

"Marx was the greatest of all theorists of socialism."

"Militarism! Here is the monstrous leech that is incessantly sucking the blood of the people and its best energy! Here is the target for our attacks! We must put an end to barbarism, proclaim that the army is now a highly organized school of crime and that it exists solely to protect bourgeois capital and profits. We must not be deterred from proclaiming ourselves international socialists. We recognize no borders and no flags, we hate all steel, every institution that exist to kill men, waste energy, strangle the advance of the workers."

"The struggle against the religious absurdity is more than ever a necessity today."

"When we claim that "God does not exist," we mean to deny by this declaration the personal God of theology, the God worshiped in various ways and divers modes by believers the world over, that God who from nothing created the universe, from chaos matter, that God of absurd attributes who is an affront to human reason."

"With each new discovery of chemistry, physics, biology, the anthropological sciences, of the practical application of sound principles, dogma collapses. It is a part of that old edifice of religion which crumbles and falls in ruins."

"How can the idea of a creator be reconciled with the existence of dwarfed and atrophied organs, with anomalies and monstrosities, with the existence of pain, perpetual and universal, with the struggle and the inequalities among human beings?"

"The Bible and morals called Christian are two cadavers."

"Religious morality shows the original stigmata of authoritarianism precisely because it pretends to be the revelation of divine authority."

"Religion is a psychic disease of the brain."

"The history of many saints, beatified by the church, is repugnant. It shows nothing more than a profound aberration of the human spirit in search of ultra-terrestrial chimeras."

"If today the Middle Ages are retiring into the thick shadows of convents, it is due to triumphant skepticism; and if the epidemic disease of religion no longer appears with the terrible intensity of former times, it is due to the diminution of the political power of the Church."

"The faculty by which man is differentiated from the lower animals is his reasoning power. But the devout believer renounces reason, refuses to explain the things which surround him, the innumerable natural phenomena, because his religious faith is enough for him. The brain loses the habit of thinking; and this religious sottishness hurls mankind back into animalism."

""Religious man" is an abnormality and "religion" is the certain cause of epidemic diseases of the mind which require the care of alienists."

"For us the national flag is a rag to be planted on a dunghill. There are only two fatherlands in the world: that of the exploited and that of the exploiters."

"The rapacious property-owning American bourgeoisie admits no limits, possesses no scruples and does not share the fears and the cowardice of our bourgeoisie. [They are] violent, absolute criminal. When they feel the need, they simply stain their hands with proletarian blood. They lack any human sense. They are only interested in exploitation."

"Socialism is not Arcadian and peaceful. We do not believe in the sacredness of human life."

"Socialism has to remain a terrifying and a majestic thing. If we follow this line, we shall be able to face our enemies."

"With the unleashing of a mighty clash of peoples, the bourgeoisie is playing its last card and calls forth on the world scene that which Karl Marx called the sixth great power: the socialist revolution."

"The law of socialism is that of the desert: a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. Socialism is a rude and bitter truth, which was born in the conflict of opposing forces and in violence. Socialism is war, and woe to those who are cowardly in war. They will be defeated."

"What does it matter to the proletarian to understand socialism as one understands a theorem? And is socialism perhaps reducible to a theorem? We want to believe in it; we must believe in it. Humanity needs a credo. It is faith that moves mountains because it gives the illusion that mountains move. Illusion is perhaps the only reality of life."

"The root of our psychological weakness was this: We socialists have never examined the problems of nations. The International was never concerned with it. The International is dead, paralyzed by events. Ten million proletarians are today on the battlefield."

"You cannot get rid of me because I am and always will be a socialist. You hate me because you still love me."

"Do not believe, even for a moment, that by stripping me of my membership card you do the same to my Socialist beliefs, nor that you would restrain me of continuing to work in favor of Socialism and of the Revolution."

"It is blood which moves the wheels of history."

"The new society cannot get out of the involucrum of the old society, except by smashing it to pieces; two conceptions, two classes, two worlds will contend for primacy, and only force will compel the weaker to disappear. For this reason, we socialists of the first school, Marxist and catastrophic, if you wish, explain to ourselves the partial violence of to-day and the violence of to-morrow… Do not call us prophets of massacre if we present the possibility that the socialist revolution will have insurrectional episodes. It is puerile to think that such a radical displacement of interests, such a profound transformation of habits can be accomplished without violent conflicts."