Journalists From Italy

"This country cannot continue to be a poor copy of television, its appendage and its monkey."

"(According to Glenn Alexander Magee) Hegel is a hermetic thinker: he replaced the philosopher with the sage and philosophy with theosophy, drawing on the Kabala, Alchemy, Rosicrucians, Gnosis and the Hermetic tradition, from Hermes Trismegistus onwards, in a broad line that goes from Meister Eckhart to Böhme, from Agrippa to Lullo and Paracelsus, from Pico della Mirandola to Giordano Bruno, to occultism and spiritism, astrology and the esotericism of Freemasonry. Hegel refers to an Invisible Church in his correspondence with Schelling and Hölderlin... But Hegel remains a Christian and a professor, not a magician or esotericist. He is inspired more by Luther than by Paracelsus."

"I don't know how many people today, 40 years after his death, remember an essential aspect for understanding Dino Buzzati, the man and his work: his old-fashioned conservative nature, apolitical, pessimistic and even reactionary, as he himself admitted, but reactionary in private, he specified, “attached to old things, to tradition, rather than to the things of tomorrow.”"

"“Andiamo meglio?" domandò il medico illustre prendendo il polso di Tito. “Andiamo meglio?”. "Sì. Andiamo.” E spirò."

"I met two or three men who were very kind to me. There was a magistrate who couldn't stand priests, and a priest who didn't have a good word to say for magistrates; and there was a landlord who let furnished rooms by the hour and spoke highly of both priests and magistrates, because both were his best clients."

"Jealousy is a fever that arises from a stupid, baseless excitement in our unthinking brain. Jealousy is a phenomenon of auto-suggestion. The woman you love has gone to bed with X. You hate X, you hate her, and you have perpetually before your eyes the vision of your loved one and X embracing in an act that fills you with horror. But you too in your time have deceived the woman you love and have done with Y what X did in bed with woman you love. Well, what remains in your skin ,your mind of Mrs Y? Nothing whatever. No more than X left with your woman. In other words, auto suggestion. Do you want evidence of that? Well, then, if you don't know the man, you imagine him to be hateful, offensive, repulsive, and you feel that if you met him you'd kill him. But, if you happen to see his photograph, you begin to realize that it's possible to look at him without horror; and believe me, if you were actually introduced to him you'd approach him with a cordial smile on your lips, look him in the eye without trembling and, if you have reached my degree of perfection, you'd actually be capable of cheerfully patting him on the back and telling him he's a good chap. In a not too distant future, reason and education will have driven home the lesson of the futility of jealousy. The day will come when our beloved children (the cuckolds of the future) will be prepared to be cuckolded and will no longer suffer for it, because we shall have inoculated them with commonsense and given them anti-cuckoldry injections."

"A man tells you the most interesting things he knows during the first half hour he talks to you; after that he either repeats himself or offers you variations on the same theme."

"I work because I need to have two thousand francs in my pocket every month, but I have no desire to glorify work either by enthusiasm or envy or emulation. Life is a mere waiting room in which we spend time before entering into the void. Who would think of working in a waiting room? While awaiting our turn we chat, we look at the pictures on the walls. But work? There is no point in it, if when our turn comes to go into the next room we shall no longer see anything."

"I've come to see that competitors are necessary to those who want to get on in the world. Opposition is indispensable to success."

"Mysticism was merely virility in a state of liquidation; sperm that had gone bad."

"The alcoholic retains the ability to condemn his addiction and advise those not subject to it to avoid succumbing to the liquid poison. But the cocaine addict likes proselytizing; thus, instead of constituting a tangible warning, every victim of the drug acts as a source of infection."

"All those people who dance in basements to harrow each other's nerve endings think and they're enjoying themselves don't realise in their frenzy that they are passive instruments in the hands of nature, which provides them with the excitement of the dance in the interest of the reproduction of the species."

"What a jester God is, Tito went on. No doubt it was He who created such blessings as water to make the grass grow, grass to fill animals' bellies, animals to fill men's bellies, women for men to keep, the serpent to cause trouble to both sexes, truffles to slice and serve with lobsters, the sun to dry washing, the stars to shine on poets, and the moon so that Neapolitan songs could be written about it. But it strikes me as strange that things should have emerged from nothing at the mere sound of their names. I think the Almighty likes parlor tricks and arranged the whole thing beforehand, that like a good conjurer He had His boxes with double bottoms and His glasses prepared in advance, and that His bravura in seeming to create everything out of nothing in six days was a piece of American-style ballyhoo designed pour épater les bourgeois."

"The mob loves those who amuse and serve it. But to amuse it you have to love it. I love no one, least of all the mob, because the mob, the multitude, are like women: they betray those who love them."

"Women are like posters. One is stuck on top of another and covers it completely. Perhaps just for a moment, when the paste is still soft and the paper still wet and slightly transparent, you may still catch a vague impression of the splashes of color of the first, but soon there's no more trace of it. Then, when the second one is removed, both come away together, leaving your memory and your heart as blank as a wall."

"Nel collegio dei Barnabiti aveva imparato il latino, a servir messa ed a giurare il falso. Tre cose di cui si può aver bisogno da un momento all'altro. Ma uscendo dal collegio le dimenticò tutte e tre. Studiò medicina per alcuni anni; ma all'esame di patologia chirurgica gli dissero: «Non posso permetterle di dare l'esame con la caramella all'occhio. O si toglie la caramella o non dà l'esame» «Ebbene, io non dò l'esame» rispose Tito alzandosi. E rinunziò alla laurea."

"Not having a moustache, he was in the habit of twirling his eyebrows. “Why do you keep twirling your eyebrows?” a young lady asked him one day. “We all twirl the hairs we have, depending on our age and sex,” Tito replied. The young lady thought him very witty and fell in love with him."

"The height of perfection is mediocrity."

"Egli sapeva che le fanciulle cominciano con un ritardo di cinque minuti e finisco con i ritardi di quindici giorni e anche più. Tutta la morale sessuale non tende, in fondo, che a scongiurare, nelle fanciulle, il pericolo dei 'ritardi'."

"Conferences are assemblies of people who argue about how to conduct an argument and end by sending a telegram of congratulation to the minister."

"When I was twenty they told me to swear loyalty to the King, a person who acts in the capacity because his father and grandfather did the same before him. I took the oath because they forced my to, otherwise I wouldn't have done it. Then they sent me to kill people I didn't know who were dressed rather like I was. One day they said to me: "Look, there's one of your enemies, fire at him," and I fired, but missed. But he fired and wounded me. I don't know why they said it was a glorious wound."

"He was forty, which is the most frightening age in life. You don't feel sorry for the old, because they are old already; you don't feel sorry for the dead, because they are dead already. But you do feel sorry for those approaching old age, those approaching death. Forty! At fairgrounds you see roller coasters dashing up a steep slope followed by a steep drop and then another ascent. At the top of the slope, or rather just before the top, the vehicle has used up all the energy it acquired in the descent and it slows down and hesitates as if the top were unattainable, as it it were terrified of the approaching plunge. The man approaching forty is in a similar state of hesitation and uncertainty; his pace slackens, he is paralyzed by the approaching summit and the descent he cannot see but knows lies just ahead."

"We have to defend views we don't share and impose them on the public; deal with questions we don't understand and vulgarize them for the gallery. We can't have ideas of our own, we have to have those of the editor; and even the editor doesn't have the right to think with his own head, because when he's sent for by the board of directors he has to stifle his own views, if he has any, and support those of the shareholders."

"No, I don't want to commit suicide, but I should like to fade away and die gently. To depart from life as one gets out of a bath."

"[T]he distance between sympathy and sensuality is as short as that which separates those two words in the dictionary."

"With your departure, that world has ended completely. For a week now, I have been trying not to think that you, dear Alessandro, have gone who knows where. And I confess that I am terrified of dreaming about you. But, my beautiful son, my beautiful boy, I will always welcome you with open arms. [...] I love you. Giampaolo, your dad."

"This applies to young journalists. Not all of them, of course, but many. They are ignorant. They may be intelligent, but they are ignorant. In the sense that school has taught them little in recent years. And they have learned even less on their own. (p. 28)"

"Istria, Dalmatia, Fiume, Pola, Zara, the exodus of 300,000 who did not want to live under Tito, their arrival in Italy amid insults and spittle from activists organized by the PCI... It is useless to talk about these tragedies to the ‘guardians of memory’. They only give the green light to memories that suit them. Instead, they prefer to keep the memory that causes them difficulty locked away in the guardhouse of silence, to silence it, to pretend it does not exist. (p. 365)"

"Ah, objective journalism! How many times have we deceived readers by waving this phantom flag. (p. 49)"

"Not all Italian journalists lie. But some of us, in different eras, have always lied. We lied on behalf of the newspaper owner, especially when the owner's number one interest was not to sell news. We lied out of deference to the ruling political power. We lied to favour the opposition. (p. 51)"

"A friend asked me, “Do you have any regrets?” I replied, “Absolutely not. Also because I have discovered a humanity I did not know. What's more, I have understood what disease is undermining the Oak.” The evil, which is no longer obscure to me, is the fear of having to reflect on oneself and re-read one's political history. And, consequently, the refusal to discuss with those who force you to show your cards and stop playing a reticent and timid game. (p. 342)"

"Well, I must confess that I haven't read all of Giampaolo Pansa's books thoroughly because I feel nauseous when I pick them up, but I know more or less how they are perceived by those who read them. We cannot get inside Giampaolo Pansa's head, so we cannot know whether this man, who used to be a left-winger, had a change of heart at some point and really said to himself: the defeated deserve to be remembered... an injustice has been done in Italy... Whether he realised the effect his books were having, or whether he realised it but cynically carried on because they made him a lot of money. We can no longer say; certainly the books are despicable, not because they may contain inaccuracies [...]. But I would not be at all surprised if these books only reported authentic episodes, because it has always been known in Italy that obviously anything could have happened in the Resistance. These are things that even in the 1950s the fascists, who incidentally were perfectly free in a democracy to publish books in which they recounted these things, so everyone already knew about them even before. [...] So, dramatic episodes? Tragic? Crimes? Crimes committed by partisans with the authorisation of the Allied authorities, who generally told the partisans to “clean up”? Who can say it doesn't matter? Of course, it is always a tragedy, but if we look at the crimes committed by the liberators, then what? The armies that marched up the peninsula committed crimes against the civilian population, against prisoners of war... Ever since they landed in Sicily, and yet the people of Italian cities welcomed them jubilantly, happy that they had arrived. So, the problem is that you can always find individual episodes in any context to put anyone in a good or bad light: what matters is who was on the right side and who was on the wrong side. And I challenge anyone today who turns up their nose at the partisans or has Pansa's books on their bookshelf in plain view to say: 'But would you have preferred the others to win? Would you want to live in a world where Hitler had won? And where the gas chambers would have continued to operate? Really? If you tell me that sincerely, I'm fine with it, okay. But I want to see which readers of Pansa's books would answer yes to that question."

"I have learned that judges should not be criticized. They are a very powerful force and jealous of their autonomy."

"How does a police officer act? When he encounters someone breaking the law, he catches them and throws them in jail. So that they dare not disobey the law again. The Gendarmes of Memory behave in the same way. They consider themselves the sole guardians of the only authorized and legitimate account of the internal conflict that bloodied Italy between the fall of 1943 and April 1945. This then led to a harsh reckoning with the defeated fascists. And anything that contradicts the narrative they defend must be refuted. Or, better still, silenced, ignored, erased. (p. VII)"

"There is no doubt that without the PCI there would have been no partisan war. And the Resistance would have been a modest undertaking. But with the PCI, the war of liberation also became a revolutionary war for the conquest of power in Italy. And this subversive project authorized a succession of errors, lies, intrigues, abuses, crimes, and mysteries: all rubbish hidden by a historiography subservient to the interests of that party. (p. IX)"

"We are a patient and hardworking people. Yet it is wise not to forget the old adage: sometimes even ants, in their own small way, get pissed off."

"I was outraged and frightened by the assault on the Senate, which saw a team of hooded men break through the first entrance. The Senate, like the Chamber of Deputies, belongs to all Italians. And I am appalled by the question posed by La Stampa on Thursday. It said: “Must we respect the Senate? Even if Schifani is there?” This small, not very ironic detail is enough to suggest that the left is no longer playing with fire, but with death."

"We are used to saying that we must defend ourselves in trials and not from trials. Yet I would like to see how the many politicians who preach this would behave."

"Satire is banned on Rai, except when it is directed against Il Caimano, hated by the red sultans. These are the masters of the many talk shows controlled by the guerrilla left. Those who, with public money, taxes and license fees paid by us foolish taxpayers, have given themselves a fanatical mission: to send Berlusconi and the center-right to hell. [...] They know they have a militant audience behind them and they excite them in many ways. [...] They move like the Khmer Rouge in Pol Pot's Cambodia. They don't cut off their opponents' heads, but they attack with the same rapid brazenness, provoking the enemy and launching surprise attacks. “Come away with me” is the clearest example of this tactic. [...] The story is an example of what Italy has become. A Babel where only the destroyers are in charge. While the Casta fills its mouth with the word “legality” and at the same time destroys it. Like the double-dealing Fini. He will have the kiss of Fazio and Saviano, even though he is glued to a chair he no longer deserves."

"Italy these days is no longer a normal country. In normal countries, acts of violence such as those committed against the bookshop in Bassano [the locks on the three entrances were sabotaged and blocked] do not happen. And if they do, they are usually severely punished. As deserved by those who arrogate to themselves the right to do anything in the name of a totalitarian perversion that authorizes them to be arrogant towards those who think differently. But in our country, the number one rule, which states that those who offend must be punished, is hardly ever applied anymore. (pp. 54-55)"

"When I hear Grillo shouting, Italians, it sends a chill down my spine, because it reminds me of someone who shouted the same word with the same emphasis from a balcony in Palazzo Venezia."

"(About Mario Capanna) In short, a leader of protest: without restraint, but also without the protection of party apparatus, always forced to be at the forefront, to make mistakes, and to pay the price personally."

"(To q:it:Angelo D'Orsi who criticized him for the absence of any footnotes in his revisionist texts on Fascism) You sell 2,000 copies and I sell 40,000... do you want footnotes too?"

"Someone said of Sergio Mattarella: in politics, he is tenacious and persistent, like a falling drop of water."

"Fabio Fazio}} He too is red, a cherry red that is unmatched even on the vermilion Rai Tre. But he loves to play the opposite role. That of the innocent little priest without a parish, friend to all and enemy to none. In reality, in today's Rai, fragmented into sultanates, there is no one more partisan than him. His hand is wrapped in gray velvet, but inside he hides a poisoned stiletto. It is with this blade that Fazio practices inflexible censorship. [...] Fazio had invited Pietro Ingrao [...]. In a moment of memory loss, the old communist leader claimed that the Italian Communist Party had strongly distanced itself from the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. A complete falsehood, as history teaches us. But Fazio and the invited audience were careful not to object. Not even a murmur, a cough, or a sidelong glance. Why? Edmondo Berselli, a free-thinking intellectual who recently passed away, explained it this way in L'Espresso: “Because at that moment, they were celebrating the apotheosis of an impossible communism, a utopia, a great dream, an assault on heaven. And so much the worse for the facts, if the facts interrupt the emotions.” Fazio is not interested in the truth of the facts. Especially when he paints a picture of Italian history and reality that clashes with his narrow political horizon."

"Many red partisan bands emerged with the aim of suppressing members of the resistance front parties. The reason for this is clear: those who were not communists but were active in parties such as the Christian Democrats, for example, could become new adversaries. And this new enemy would certainly have opposed the PCI's revolutionary strategy and its plan to seize power in newly liberated Italy. These were, therefore, targeted political crimes. Aimed at terrorizing opponents within the anti-fascist alliance and destroying their ability to resist the communists' plans. (pp. 200-201)"

"Words can turn into stones, stones into bullets. It has already happened: Italy was held captive by terrorism for almost twenty years. It is a danger that could return, and I would not want Grillo, even against his plans and programs, to become the vehicle for this terrible evil."

"Today's street protests are not being led by students. They are being led by another privileged class: university professors and researchers. They do not want to lose their privileges, which are considerable for the former and modest for the latter. That is what matters to them, not the comatose state of Italian universities."

"The hardest [defeat] came in 2014 when Matteo Renzi's government, which had been in office for a few weeks, dismissed the heads of all state-owned companies. At that time, you were the CEO of the large Finmeccanica group. You knew everything about that group because you had been working there for 12 years, climbing the ladder step by step. And, together with a small group of young executives, you had steered it with a steady hand. You never talked to me about your downfall, but I could sense your bitterness mixed with anger."

"Giorgio Bocca can be summed up in a few words. He was a great journalist, but also highly partisan and prone to serious errors. We worked together at the same newspapers, starting with Il Giorno and then spending many years at La Repubblica and L'Espresso, but we were never friends. Bocca was a complex man: he did not like competitors or people who contradicted him. We fought many battles against each other, but there is no point in dwelling on them. Today, Giorgio is gone. I don't know if Italy will miss him, as some of his colleagues at La Repubblica say, but he will certainly leave a void... which I, however, do not regret."