All Quotes

"Art was always a means to an end with me. You get an idea, and you just can't wait. Once you've started, then you're in there with the punches flying. There's plenty of trouble, but you can handle it. You can't back out. It gets you down once in a while, but it's exciting. Our whole business is exciting."

"I believe firmly in the efficacy of religion, in its powerful influence on a person's whole life. It helps immeasurably to meet the storms and stress of life and keep you attuned to the Divine inspiration. Without inspiration, we would perish."

"Laughter is timeless, imagination has no age, and dreams are forever."

"If you can dream it, you can do it."

"I have seen children brought to me in terrible panics, and interestingly enough most often the Walt Disney movies which do depict very disturbing mother figures. The mothers are always killed or sent to the insane asylums in Walt Disney movies. They are among my experience for Frankenstein, the worst movies in the world for children who have had a problems of the loss of a parent."

"So I took my drawings out there and did an interview and I got accepted right away. They said, "Come to work." So I went to work. Walt was still alive then, and he was working on two things; Sleeping Beauty and building Disneyland. Disneyland occupied, probably, about 80% of his time and we got about 20% of it. I remember the meetings and I remember meeting him. I remember what it was like when what we were building was a film that actually had some soul. A piece of artwork That's what we were filming. It wasn't about "make something quick for the marketers.""

"When I look at the early days when Walt was really in command of the studio, the pictures did not look like each other at all. They were all different. Bambi doesn't look like Snow White. Snow White doesn't look like Pinnochio. Then Dumbo comes along and that's its own movie and then Fantasia what's that? Each one of these was reaching for something. They all followed the rules of good storytelling."

"I remember once that Walt said something to the effect that, "I'll make the picture; and when I make the picture then you marketing guys can have it." Nowadays, it's the marketing department telling you what they want."

"Walt wanted to communicate with a global audience. … He wanted to communicate with a multicultural audiance."

"(Ha!) You belong to Disney, which means you stay busy Cranking out magic and assembly line whimsy! Artists begging me to stop; I won't let 'em! Labor conditions in my shop? I don't sweat 'em! I'm powerful enough to make a mouse gigantic! With only 3 circles, I dominate the planet! (Ha!) Clearly, there's nobody near me! I'm owning this battle! In fact, I own this whole series! So hop on my Steamboat, boys, but don't rock it! I'll put on a smile on your face and green in your pocket! You'll be safe and insured when you're under my employ! Now, look at it! Gaze upon my empire of joy!"

"Disney, for all his pining for a perfect world (embodied in his depiction of a turn-of-the-century Main Street), did not entirely ignore the authentic. He did kill Bambi's mom, remember. He did permit, perhaps encourage, the occasional sense of danger."

"Disney World has acquired by now something of the air of a national shrine. American parents who don't take their children there sense obscurely that they have failed in some fundamental way, like Muslims who never made it to Mecca."

"There is a relationship between cartooning and people Miró and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney."

"He was a very religious man, but he didn't believe you had to go to church to be religious. … He respected every religion. There wasn't any that he ever criticized. He wouldn't even tell religious jokes."

"He definitely believed in God — very definitely. But I think he'd had it [with organized religion] as a child. He never went to church."

"That's really an interesting thought because one of things Walt was always complaining about – and I think that's one of the reasons Walt continually pushed for innovation at his studio – was that he always wanted to make things better, he wanted to make new things possible. I think Walt would have been quite impressed with the new digital technology because he would have a brand new tool that he could use in amazing ways. So while on one hand we've lost something as we move forward, I do recognise that things will always be changing. Animation changed from the 1930s to the 40s, on up through the 50s and 60s; there has always been new technologies being created, enabling us to make a better product."

"Most family historians agree that Elias's authoritarian and sometimes cruel nature — and propensity for whipping and even beating his young sons — played a role in turning Walt and Roy against the church. The brothers' ambivalent relationship with organized religion is well documented, as is their strong, personal faith in God."

"Despite the absence of a unifying "story" in Fantasia, there are along the way images and sequences with implications and messages — inspirational and disturbing, subtle and strong, scientific and pagan and Christian — all worth noting."

"Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethos … where you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great."

"Walt was a strange kind of guy, but he’s still by all odds the most important person that animation has ever known. Anybody who knows anything about animation knows that the things that happened at the Disney Studio were the backbone that upheld everything else. Disney created a climate that enabled all of us to exist"

"Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and unlike Marx, delivered on his promise."

"He probably did more to heal, or at least soothe troubled human spirits than all the psychiatrists in the world."

"Walt considered himself religious yet he never went to church. The heavy dose of religiosity in his childhood discouraged him; he especially disliked sanctimonious preachers. But he admired an respected every religion, and his belief in God never wavered."

"In Italy ... rugby has 'long been appreciated for its pedagogical value as a "'maker of men"'. ... Rugby expanded further in the Fascist era as a propaganda tool for conditioning the masses to Fascist aims. Such conditioning combined the physical with the ideological in the making of men to serve the state and its aims."

"By 1939 [Fascist] Italy had the highest percentage of state-owned enterprises outside of the Soviet Union."

"Mussolini and Hitler promised to restore national glory and depicted themselves as the last defense against radical socialism. Neither appealed to racism at first. Not even Hitler, who muted his virulent anti-Semitism in public to attract voters during the late 1920s. New followers told themselves he had mellowed, but his base and his Jewish targets never doubted his true intentions."

"Many powerful right-wing movements of the early twentieth century―National Socialism, Fascism, and their imitators elsewhere―also expressed a nostalgia for the Middle Ages. The Italian poet and Futurist Gabriele D'Annunzio espoused a "socialist romanticism" that helped lay the foundations of the Fascist corporatist state. In France, the leaders of Action Francaise sought to bring about a "counter-Renaissance" and reimpose the hierarchical corporative structure of the ancien regime. In England, Fascist sympathizers like Oswald Mosley lamented the passing of "Merrie old England," swept away by the competitive reality of ethnically mixed modern cities. Even today, some on the European far-right see in the Middle Ages an affirmation of traditional Christian values, and find inspiration in the Crusader response to assaults from Islamic aggression."

"Two things make the future real, the artist's imagination and the worker's hope. Fascism destroys both. Therefore the artist and the worker must unite to destroy Fascism. The Fascist artist is a traitor, the neutral is already dead. Art and anti-Fascism are synonymous."

"The parallels between fascism and Communism as ideologies are significant."

"Yeah, no. Fascism is not kind. It is not decent. It does not care about the individual, because the individual is subservient to the state, and in particular whoever runs that state. It is not compatible with Steve Rogers. Fascism does not fight for "the greater good", it fights for the exaltation of the inhuman, the commemoration of cruelty, and the hatred of the different. Fascism is a loser ideology."

"When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled "made in Germany"; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, "Americanism. … The high-sounding phrase "the American way" will be used by interested groups intent on profit, to cover a multitude of sins against the American and Christian tradition, such sins as lawless violence, teargas and shotguns, denial of civil liberties ... There is an obligation resting on us all to dedicate our minds to the hard task of thinking in terms of Christian objectives and values, so that we may be saved from moral confusion. For never, probably, has there been a time when there was a more vigorous effort to surround social and international questions with such a fog of distortion and prejudices and hysterical appeal to fear."

"The totalitarian states, whether of the fascist or the communist persuasion, are more than superficially alike as dictatorships, in the suppression of dissent, and in operating planned and directed economies. They are profoundly alike."

"I witnessed the rise of fascism in Germany and I know very well that very many young people at that time adhered to fascism out of a sincere indignation at the capitalist system."

"The fascists have reaped what they have sown. The workers will not tolerate anyone defying them on their ground. The experience of Italy and Germany tears too strongly at the heart of all proletarians to allow it to happen again."

"Fascism is a vehicle for weak, insecure people to feel powerful in the most cowardly way possible: By violating and abusing those they believe can’t fight back. It’s the attitude of the rapist and the child abuser, someone who pathetically congratulates himself for being "tough" because of his violence, but who fears taking on someone his own size."

"What distinguishes liberal from Fascist political tactics is not a difference of opinion in regard to the necessity of using armed force to resist armed attackers, but a difference in the fundamental estimation of the role of violence in a struggle for power. The great danger threatening domestic policy from the side of Fascism lies in its complete faith in the decisive power of violence. In order to assure success, one must be imbued with the will to victory and always proceed violently. This is its highest principle. What happens, however, when one's opponent, similarly animated by the will to be victorious, acts just as violently? The result must be a battle, a civil war. The ultimate victor to emerge from such conflicts will be the faction strongest in number. In the long run, a minority — even if it is composed of the most capable and energetic — cannot succeed in resisting the majority. The decisive question, therefore, always remains: How does one obtain a majority for one's own party? This, however, is a purely intellectual matter. It is a victory that can be won only with the weapons of the intellect, never by force. The suppression of all opposition by sheer violence is a most unsuitable way to win adherents to one's cause. Resort to naked force — that is, without justification in terms of intellectual arguments accepted by public opinion — merely gains new friends for those whom one is thereby trying to combat. In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails."

"Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect — better because they alone give promise of final success. This is the fundamental error from which Fascism suffers and which will ultimately cause its downfall. The victory of Fascism in a number of countries is only an episode in the long series of struggles over the problem of property. The next episode will be the victory of Communism. The ultimate outcome of the struggle, however, will not be decided by arms, but by ideas. It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales. So much for the domestic policy of Fascism. That its foreign policy, based as it is on the avowed principle of force in international relations, cannot fail to give rise to an endless series of wars that must destroy all of modern civilization requires no further discussion. To maintain and further raise our present level of economic development, peace among nations must be assured. But they cannot live together in peace if the basic tenet of the ideology by which they are governed is the belief that one's own nation can secure its place in the community of nations by force alone. It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error."

"Fascism is a matter of taste."

"The twigs will be tied together in a neater and stronger bundle if they are all the same size and length. That's fascism. It suggests that you have two contrary organisational principles involved ... One is a kind of linear, mechano-like organisation – tie up all the sticks, make sure they are the same length, and you have a brick wall or something. The other one – anarchy – is a more fractal more natural more human organisational system in that it organises society in much the same way that we organise our personalities. Where it is purely the interplay of neurons – we haven't got a king neuron that tells all the other neurons what to do. It seems to me to be a more emotionally natural way of working with other people."

"The Fascist State directs and controls the entrepreneurs, whether it be in our fisheries or in our heavy industry in the Val d'Aosta. There the State actually owns the mines and carries on transport, for the railways are state property. So are many of the factories... We term it state intervention... If anything fails to work properly, the State intervenes. The capitalists will go on doing what they are told, down to the very end. They have no option and cannot put up any fight. Capital is not God; it is only a means to an end."

"Margaret Thatcher had been in power for two or three years. She was facing the first crisis of her, by then, very unpopular government. There were riots all over Britain in places that hadn't seen riots for hundreds of years. There were fascists groups, the National Front, the British National Party, who were flexing their muscles and sort of trying to make political capital out of what were fairly depressed and jobless times. It seemed to me that with the kind of Reagan/Thatcher axis that existed across the Atlantic, it looked like Western society was taking somewhat a turn for the worse. There were ugly fascist stains starting to reassert themselves that we might have thought had been eradicated back in the '30s. But they were reasserting themselves with a different spin. They were talking less about annihilating whichever minority they happened to find disfavor with and talking more about free market forces and market choice and all of these other kind of glib terms, which tended to have the same results as an awful lot of the kind of Fascist causes back in the 1930s but with a bit more spin put upon them. The friendly face of fascism."

"Fascism... was the product of... the... European crisis of the post-First World War political and economic order... Fascist movements... were the immediate aftermath of the First World War, marked by the threat from the left following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution... and... conflict in... Europe before, during and after the Versailles settlement of 1919–20, and the Great Depression of 1929–33, an economic recession... that... appeared to be the structural and terminal crisis of malfunctioning capitalist economies and polities. Springing up... the various fascisms... were radical hyper-nationalist cross-class movements with a distinctive militarist organisation and activist political style. In a climate of... national and international danger and crisis, they sought... regeneration... through the violent destruction of all political forms and forces... held responsible for national disunity and divisiveness, and the creation of a new national order based on the moral or 'spiritual' reformation of their peoples, a 'cultural revolution' achievable only through the 'total' control of society, and on class collaborative, regulatory forms of socio-economic organisation, often of a corporatist nature. ... ...was part of one general European response to a general European crisis of liberal democracy which matured in the wartime and inter-war years."

"Both political Parties, and the remnants of Liberalism as well, stand bound by the great vested interests of "Right" and "Left" which created them. In Opposition, there is the same profusion of promise; in office, the same apathy and inertia. In post-War England, their creeds have become platitudes; they consistently fail to grapple with the problems of the time. Their rule has led, with tragic inevitability, to the present chaos. Therefore our Fascist Movement seeks on the one hand authority as the basis of all solid achievement; we seek, on the other hand, progress, which can be achieved only by the executive instrument that order, authority and decision alone can give."

"Governments and Parties which have relied on the normal instruments of government...have fallen easy and ignoble victims to the forces of anarchy. If, therefore, such a situation arises in Britain, we shall prepare to meet the anarchy of Communism with the organised force of Fascism."

"Fascist policy is clear cut. We have a right to stay in India and we intend to stay there. We have more than a right; we have a duty to stay there. We have a right because modern India owes everything to British rule."

"Nothing is permanent: certainly not the frozen images of barbarous power with which fascism now confronts us. Those images may easily be smashed by an external shock, cracked as ignominiously as the fallen Dagon, the massive idol of the heathen; or they may be melted, eventually, by the internal warmth of normal men and women. Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal. As life becomes insurgent once more in our civilization, conquering the reckless thrust of barbarism, the culture of cities will be both instrument and goal."

"We want an extraordinary heavy taxation, with a progressive character, on capital, that will represent an authentic partial expropriation of all wealth; seizures of all assets of religious congregations and suppression of all the ecclesiastic Episcopal revenues, in what constitutes an enormous deficit of the nation and a privilege for a minority; revisions of all contracts made by the war ministers and seizure of 85% of all war profits."

"If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable."

"Standing by me and helping my work as newspaper man were the Fascisti. They were composed of revolutionary spirits who believed in intervention. They were youths—the students of the universities, the socialist syndicalists—destroying faith in Karl Marx by their ideals."

"My conception always was that Fascism must assume the characteristics of being anti-party. It was not to be tied to old or new schools of any kind. The name "Italian Fighting Fascisti" was lucky. It was most appropriate to a political action that had to face all the old parasites and programmes that had tried to deprave Italy. I felt that it was not only the anti-socialist battle we had to fight; this was only a battle on the way. ... It was therefore not sufficient to create—as some have said superficially—an anti-altar to the altar of socialism. It was necessary to imagine a wholly new political conception, adequate to the living reality of the twentieth century, overcoming at the same time the ideological worship of liberalism, the limited horizons of various spent and exhausted democracies, and finally the violently Utopian spirit of ."