Alcide De Gasperi

"The truth must be told whatever the cost."

"I take the floor in this world assembly and I feel that everything, except your personal courtesy, is against me: it is above all my qualification as a former enemy, which makes me feel like an accused person, that I have arrived here after the most influential among you have already formulated their conclusions in a long and laborious elaboration.[... ] I have the duty before the conscience of my country and to defend the vitality of my people to speak as an Italian, but I feel the responsibility and the right to speak also as an anti-fascist democrat, as a representative of the new Republic that, harmonising in itself the humanitarian aspirations of Giuseppe Mazzini ([an Italian 33rd degree Scottish Rite Freemason]), the universalist conceptions of Christianity and the internationalist hopes of the workers, is all directed towards that lasting and reconstructive peace that you seek and towards that cooperation between peoples that you have the task of establishing."

"There are many who only make a small excursion into politics, as amateurs, and others who regard it, and it is for them, as an accessory of secondary importance. But for me, ever since I was a boy, it was my career, my mission."

"Communism as implemented in the USSR is at the antipodes of Nazism: communism is imbued with Christian brotherhood and is therefore anti-racist par excellence, while Nazism and Fascism are essentially and primarily racist. Thus two irreconcilable and opposite phenomena Communism and Nazism."

"When I see that while Hitler and Mussolini persecuted men because of their race, and invented the appalling anti-Jewish legislation that we know, and I see at the same time the Russians made up of 160 races seeking the fusion of these races by overcoming the differences existing between Asia and Europe, this attempt, this effort towards the unification of human consortium, let me say: this is Christian, this is eminently universalistic in the sense of Catholicism."

"It is true that the functioning of economic democracy demands disinterestedness, just as that of political democracy supposes the virtue of character. The work of renewal will fail if in all categories, in all centres, there do not arise selfless men, ready to toil and sacrifice for the common good."

"There is in Italy a fourth Party, which may not have many voters, but which is capable of paralysing and rendering futile all our efforts, by organising the sabotage of loans and the flight of capital, price increases or scandal campaigns. Experience has convinced me that Italy cannot be governed today without attracting into the new formation of government, in one form or another, representatives of this fourth party, of the party of those who have the money and economic strength."