Journalists From Italy

"Nowadays, everybody complains about the decadent character of great and minor men alike. Let woman's character and personality evolve, and you will see woman, the real mother, will raise not cream puffs but real men!"

"Another fifteen days have gone by; in this life of uncertainty and anxiety our very soul seems suspended. Our struggles in the field of labor are in a lull, weakened by the crisis that hampers us in affirming any rights. Our educational work seems ironic, now that the war has so deeply disillusioned us about our strengths. Yet we must go on living and waiting; the best we can do is to keep alive in our hearts the ideal flame of faith that seems to blow out under the rush of the storm. Meanwhile let us follow the events of the terrible war: we cannot count the dead, hundreds of thousands if not already a million. The fate that seemed to smile at German audacity now turns against its very arrogance. Like the soul of the common people, we see here a sanction imposed by the justice inherent in things."

"I have chosen the question of woman's labor because I think it is the kernel of the whole woman question, as I firmly believe in the following great and fundamental truth of modern ethics, which is valid for both man and woman: labor alone, of whatever nature, divided and remunerated with equity, is the actual source of the enhancement of the human species."

"However, with the evolution of modern civilization, the element of physical strength was increasingly eliminated from social activities, industrial production, and even agriculture, so that women of the social classes who earn a living through labor gradually found themselves in a situation more or less the same as that of men. And it is especially in our century that, owing to the laws of political economy-which we will not here take into consideration-and by collaborating directly in the production of social wealth, woman could become aware of her equivalence with man."

"Is there a woman scholar in Italy who does not know the persistent and courageous efforts of such intellectually and morally gifted women as Giuseppina Poggiolini, Anna Maria Mozzoni, Laura Mantegazza, Gualberta Beccari, and others, to whom they owe the acquired right of pursuing higher and professional education?"

"All the dispossessed and pariahs of society are on the move; they beg for some light, air, and a life that accords with human dignity. It is therefore only natural that, in our century, a serious and vast movement has emerged among the last and most numerous of pariahs who form half of humanity-that is, women."

"With few exceptions, every man of any social class, owing to an infinity of unflattering reasons for a sex that passes as strong, considers the privilege of his sex as a natural phenomenon and defends it with astonishing tenacity, calling on God, the Church, science, ethics, and existing laws, which are merely the legal sanction of the prevarication of a dominant class and sex. And it is for this reason that, in spite of the intimate connections between these various problems, it seemed to me that I could isolate that of the social condition of woman from all other morbid phenomena of the social organism, mostly generated by that terrible tragedy of life, the struggle for existence."

"We women, who feel most responsible for the broken lives and calamities of war, and who therefore are by nature and by logic the most averse to war and least responsive to the lures of patriotism and combat, we are the most vigilant. If in the modest milieux where we live, our modest word can be of any value, let us employ it to dampen false enthusiasms, to recall to reality those who pursue reckless illusions. We, first among all, defend our party against the accusation of cowardice leveled against it. Let those who want to show their courage keep it for other, more sacred and fruitful battles!"

"It is true that what has pushed public opinion increasingly against the Germans are excesses committed against the rules of international law that had been established as preventive measures to make war (as it were) less barbaric. But why would we want to punish the authors of such horrors by spreading further carnage? Do we not have a similar burden on our consciences? Who does not recall the ears of Arabs brought back from Libya as souvenirs by our soldiers?"

"The judgment of the civil world will issue a sentence much more useful in its moral effects than punishment inflicted with weapons at our own risk and danger. Thus we must oppose these false enthusiasms, in whatever quarter they arise."

""In Milan there is only one man, who is actually a woman," wrote Antonio Labriola in an 1893 letter to Friedrich Engels, reporting on the "state of the art" of Italian socialism. The woman was Anna Kuliscioff, one of the founding members of the Socialist Party of Italian Workers, whose cosmopolitan militancy in Russia, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, and Italy at the turn of the twentieth century actively contributed to the flourishing of the Socialist International and, above all, to the construction and "deprovincialization" of Italian socialism...The delicate and relentless task of combining-without reconciling-the distinct and at times divergent instances of women's emancipation and class struggle that Kuliscioff first developed in this speech remained through all her writings the hallmark of her much underappreciated socialist feminism."

"Character never joins forces with servility. And, indeed, men and women-especially the latter-who have an independent character are often regarded as rebellious, unsettled and troubled people, a danger to society."

"For the triumph of the cause of my sex, I hope only that men will be slightly less intolerant and women slightly more supportive of each other. Perhaps, at that point, the prophecy of the greatest poet of our century, Victor Hugo, will be realized: he predicted of woman what William Ewart Gladstone predicted of the factory worker-that the nineteenth century would be the "Century of the Woman.""

"It is true that man's fear of competition plays a great role in this, which is dissimulated through social ethics arguments, based mostly on religious biases and habit. But by far most influential is the unconscious fear of having one day to renounce, out of love or necessity, the authority and arrogance of his sex, which has been embedded in man since prehistorical times—and I concede that abdicating power is always a difficult and painful thing."

"In the end, even if history has some bad pupils, it somehow teaches."

"Please, someone stop this nightmare. Choosing to remain silent means somehow lends support to the genocide unfolding right now. Shout out your indignation, in every capital of the 'civilised' world, in every city, in every square, covering our own screams of pain and terror. A slice of humanity is dying while pitifully listening out for a response."

"The 'civilized' world's silence is more deafening than the exlopsions covering the city like a shroud of death and terror."

"They will make a desert and call it peace."

"Stay human."

"We will continue to make poems out of our lives, until freedom is declaimed above the broken chains of all oppressed peoples."

"Knowing is the first step towards a solution."

"Justice and human rights cannot be selective."

"[Referring to Israeli-Palestinian conflict] I knew I was coming to see terrible things, but not such terrible things."

"I don't believe in borders, barriers, flags. I believe that we all belong, regardless of latitudes and longitudes, to the same family, which is the human family."

"I believe there are different types of resistance, there is an armed resistance and there is another resistance: a civil resistance."

"I, who don't believe in war, don't want to be buried under any flag. If anything I would like to be remembered for my dreams. Should I die one day - in a hundred years - I would like to have what Nelson Mandela said on my gravestone: "A winner is a dreamer who has never stopped dreaming". Vittorio Arrigoni: a winner."

"Mussolini was a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy. There hasn't been any other politicians like that in the last fifty years."

"I didn't believe that Giorgia Meloni could recompose a political community that had also been human: I was wrong, she has built a small authentic masterpiece, if today the right wing is the governing right wing, it is due to that political intuition to restore political dignity to the right wing."

"It’s clear that we hoped for better in terms of immigration when we have worked so hard, the results are not what we hoped for. It is certainly a very complex problem, but I am sure we will get to the bottom of it."

"We are taking a step forward in the process of European reunification. Enlargement also means new challenges, but I am convinced that the integration of the BP countries into the EU is in the best interests of Europe's security. Our destinies are intertwined."

"It is an important moment for the Albanian nation and all of us. The European identity of Albania is a fact of history. Albania is Europe like Italy, regardless of whether you are part of a certain organization or not. I always smile when someone tries to claim who is European and who is not."

"Italy’s Giorgia Meloni opens Africa summit with plan to curb migration and boost development. Euro News ( January 29, 2024)."

"It’s a cooperation of equals, far from any predatory temptation but also far from the charitable posture with Africa that rarely is reconciled with its extraordinary potential for development."

"We want to free up African energy to guarantee younger generations a right which to date has been denied, Because here in Europe we talk a lot about the right to emigrate, but we rarely talk about guaranteeing the right to not be forced to emigrate."

"With the same determination I want to say that we stand by the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella every time he is attacked for the sole reason of having recalled who the attackers and who the attacked are."

"I believe it is not wise to fall into the temptation of retaliations, which become a vicious circle in which everyone loses."

"I am convinced that we must continue to work with concreteness and pragmatism, to find a possible common ground and avoid a trade war that would benefit no one, neither the United States nor Europe."

"Therefore we welcome this phase and support the effort launched by President Trump."

"it is the stalemate on the ground that today can lead to peace negotiations and I think we should proudly claim the united and determined support for the Ukrainian people."

"in the face of proposals that we respect but do not convince us, always thanking those who at this stage take the responsibility of making proposals, I will be clear in front of this Chamber: the sending of Italian troops to Ukraine is a topic that has never been on the agenda, just as we believe that the sending of European troops, proposed initially by the United Kingdom and France, is a very complex, risky and ineffective option."

"It is right for Europe to equip itself to play its part but gullible to think it can do so on its own, outside the framework."

"It is a banal fact of reality that it isn't possible to imagine a guarantee of enduring security by diving Europe from the United States."

"That’s the reason why we inspire so much fear. That’s why this [World Congress of Families] event inspires so much fear. Because we do not want to be numbers. We will defend the value of a human being. Every single human being. Because each of us has a unique genetic code that is unrepeatable. And, like it or not, that is sacred. We will defend it. We will defend God, country and family. Those things that disgust people so much. We will do it to defend our freedom because we will never be slaves and simple consumers at the mercy of financial speculators. That is our mission. That is why I came here today. Chesterton wrote more than a century ago, “Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.” That time has arrived. We are ready."

"There is a single answer to all these questions. Because it defines us. Because it is our identity. Because everything that defines us is now an enemy. For those who would like us to no longer have an identity and to simply be perfect consumer slaves. And so, they attack national identity, they attack religious identity, they attack gender identity, they attack family identity. I can’t define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother. No. I must be Citizen X, Gender X, Parent 1, Parent 2, I must be a number. Because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators. The perfect consumer."

"Why is the family an enemy? Why is the family so frightening?"

"Why do we spend our time fighting all types of discrimination but we pretend not to see the greatest ongoing persecution, the genocide of the world’s Christians?"

"If the life of a sick child like Alfie Evans is defined as pointless, how long before they define as pointless the life of a disabled or elderly person? Or anyone who doesn’t correspond to the idea of a perfect consumer?"

"Why if they told us that that the father of Eluana Englaro should be free to disconnect the plug that kept her alive, because nobody knows better than a parent what is best for their child, why did the same not apply to the parents of Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans? Why is the winner always the one who wants to disconnect the plug? Why is the winner always death?"

"Why do Italian courts take away legal custody from two married parents, the natural parents of a baby girl, saying they are too old to raise her at 52 and 54, taking away their natural daughter? But if two men over 50 go abroad and buy a child, that’s fine. Why?"

"Is it right for a society to spend more energy and resources trying to find quick and easy ways to get rid of human life, rather than trying to encourage it? Is that normal? Is that civilized? Is it right that you, correctly, cannot rip a newborn puppy from the bosom of its mother but you can with a baby, the child of a desperate mother who sold it to two rich men?"