People From Turin

"creativity is not the monopoly of the Shakespeares and Einsteins of this world. There is a science of intelligent living, an art of being fully human, in which we all can and ought to be creative. To use our imagination is part of the total art of being. To imagine other people's imagination is part of the art of being with others."

"Imagine what life would be like without imagination! There would be no Michelangelo or Da Vinci, no Edison, no delinquents and no saints, no Mozart, no nuclear power."

"We should train ourselves in the use of imagination when we are well, so that we are ready to use it when we are not."

"Like any other faculty, imagination can be starved and suffocated or stimulated and nourished."

"Infinity and eternity are the limits of imagination. You can project your imagination into the past or into the future; you can destroy an old image that has troubled you or create a new one that will rejoice you."

"this transformation is really the key now, isn’t it, to our living: to be able to transform. (1968)"

"It’s marvelous when you think of words. If you just think of any one word, not just thinking about how it came about in the expression, but just what your mouth does to pronounce that word (1968)"

"focus your mind and respect your body. But mostly love your heart. I think that is where to begin, from there and then it goes out...Love your heart. It really is to love yourself to begin with and help everybody else in doing the same. But the heart being the center. You can focus your mind. You can respect your body. All of that is important. Then if you love your heart, this can be transmitted to other people. I mean you can help anybody that wants to do the same."

"our society can improve only if the next generation is given the chance, through loving and intelligent education, to be better developed than the present one."

"Service or giving is the other side of receiving. Giving and receiving is a full circle: a full circle feels more natural than a half circle."

"Beauty, well, it's one of the greatest, greatest gifts. I feel sorry sometimes because people are so worried and so involved in something that they don't have even five minutes to look at something beautiful. I find beauty almost everywhere."

"There is danger in everything that we do. We are to eat food otherwise we don’t live and sometimes we eat food that is very damaging...Or addicted to food. Oh, yes, addiction to food is unfortunately really grave, also to alcohol or to anything else. But these drugs can be such an extraordinary gift, really. Some, not all drugs. Again, how can we speak about "drugs"? It is like speaking about the human race—each person is different, each drug is different!"

"(How have psychedelics helped or harmed or influenced you?) LAH: I was deeply affected. They gave me a much wider view of the world, as well as a much wider view of our ignorance, and ignorance, according to the Buddha, is our basic difficulty. Psychedelics and the process of aging make that clear to me all the time."

"I discovered that some of the clearest and most practical answers to certain of my questions were being given by my wife in the "Recipes for Living and Loving," which she was composing for the benefit of those who came to her for psychological aid and counsel. Some of her recipes (for example, those for the Transformation of Energy) have found their way, almost unmodified, into my phantasy. Others have been changed and developed to suit the needs of my imaginary society and to fit into its peculiar culture. This literary debt is one which, along with all my other non-literary debts to the author of You Are Not the Target, I am happy to acknowledge."

"When a book is amusing and charming and quite easy to understand we are apt to dismiss it as a lightweight. Don't make this mistake about Laura Huxley. She offers you nothing less than a new life."

"He gave the witness of a particularly intense and competent commitment both from a pastoral and organizational, and an artistic-cultural point of view, endeavouring to restore spiritual vitality to the entire complex and new zeal to the ecumenical vocation of that place of worship."

"A loud call goes out to the entire Christian world to continue to heed the message of St Paul, Apostle of the Nations, who spoke and wrote to the Corinthians, the Galatians, the Ephesians, the Colossians, the Thessalonians, the Jews and the Romans in his time, and continues today to speak to the Nations on every continent."

"Many times I say to the Americans: "You're looking for someone and not something". In effect this "someone" benefits from the "something", from the traffic in drugs."

"To accuse a Salesian of being a bit weak in his Marian piety is frankly a bit ridiculous. From when I was little I was brought up always to turn trustingly towards Our Lady of Help. And over the years, thanks be to God, that trust has never faded. That, however, doesn’t mean that one mustn't always respect the official position, as it is, of the Church on delicate questions such as those regarding real or alleged Marian apparitions."

"Pier Giorgio is proof that it is also possible to be holy while living entirely with the world, having fun with friends, drinking a glass of wine, going to theater, at school … his living with the world, enjoying the beauties of the world; but that didn’t lessen the spiritual part of his life — on the contrary.And he had the exact same problems and concerns as so many young people today. He used to have difficulties with exams, which weighed down on him a lot. This is why many students identify themselves with him. He also had problems with his parents, who didn’t get along and who were about to separate. He also secretly loved a young woman that he decided to let go. His joyful faith and his freedom are also a great source of inspiration for youth. Pier Giorgio instilled the idea that faith is not something that limits you; on the contrary, it frees you; it gives you wings. He used to have an incredible freedom in his opinions, choices — in everything. He believed that freedom is the greatest gift that God gave to his creatures."

"He didn’t want a life of spiritual mediocrity, he didn’t want mere worldly success, he wanted the heights of intimacy with Christ and service to the poor."

"The study of the geometry of a Galois space Sr,q, i. e. of a projective r-dimensional space over a Galois field of order q = ph. where p, h are positive integers and p is a prime (the characteristic of the field), has recently been pursued and developed along new lines ... In it, both algebraic-geometric and arithmetical methods have been applied, including the use of electronic calculating machines; moreover, some of the problems dealt with are deeply connected with information theory, especially with the construction of q-ary error-correcting codes. It is actually a chapter of arithmetical geometry, which reduces to the investigation of certain questions on congruences mod p in the particular case when h = 1."

"Non vi sarebbe quindi da stupirsi se le geometrie di Galois venissero and avere in futuro applicazioni anche al campo della fisica, da cui attualmente sembrano molto lontane esce anzi tali spazi finiti portassero alla costruzione di schemi a modelli dove i fenomeni fisici trovassero interpretazioni matematiche più semplici di quelle consuete. (It would not be much of a surprise if Galois geometry in the future came to have applications in the field of the physics, from which these finite geometries are currently far removed. These finite geometries might lead to the construction of models in which physical phenomena have simpler mathematical interpretations than the models now used. — modified from the original translation by Tallini)"

"A nonsingular cubic surface F can be rationally represented upon a plane α if and only if F contains a rational point."

"C varieties in four-space were first investigated by Segre, in two memoirs ... which are still classic, and in which he gave a generation of those having more than six nodes, especially the one with ten nodes, while he also considered varieties containing a plane, and gave some of their properties."

"Opposing homosexual families is only possible in the name of a philosophical belief about the natural essence of the family itself. This cannot be professed by a lay state."

"I grew up as a Catholic militant; when I was a boy I used to read authors like Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier and novelists like Bernanos. But Catholic inspiration led me also to read authors that were heretical to the modern tradition. I didn’t like rationalistic historicism that came from Enlightenment, peaking in Hegel and Marx."

"Those who rail against relativism are not addressing us as individuals, who are not and can never be relativists—since perhaps only God can truly be so, looking down from above on the plurality of cultures and interpretations. Relativism can only be a feature of society, since it is within society that multiple worldviews coexist and often clash. Would eliminating the vice of relativism not simply mean doing away with liberal society?"

"Just as Western literature would be unthinkable without the Homeric poems, without Shakespeare, without Dante, so our culture as a whole would be meaningless if we were to cut Christianity out of it."

"Someone said that it is important — you cannot live without it — exactly because it is useless. As Heidegger put it in a famous sentence: "Science doesn't think" — precisely because it is useful, it works toward goals that it doesn’t choose. In Kantian terms, science deals with phenomena, factual data that it receives according to reason’s frames, organizes them in time and space, expresses them mathematically, connects and measures them in various ways. But Kant says that there is the noumenon beyond the phenomenon: what you can think but is phenomenologically unknown. It is part of what Kant calls the "Kingdom of Ends". In this kingdom you encounter freedom; that is something impossible to know phenomenologically. The same goes for the existence of God. In philosophy, there are higher questions that usually don’t have an answer because they do not concern phenomenal data, the way science does. This is the source of a peculiar feeling of uselessness and void-ness about philosophy. But we cannot live without it if we don’t want to become machines or robots."

"The paradoxical fact is that it is precisely the passion for truth, conscience, in its search for the truth, that has come to undermine itself: it has discovered, in fact, that it is just a passion like any other."

"The tradition of the Catholic Church is based on keeping the faithful under terrorist threats. The story of Eluana Englaro shows that the Catholic Church as an institution cannot be reformed; it deserves only to be destroyed. We are witnessing the final madness"

"Even if we have to think that the Higgs boson has nothing to do with God, it is nevertheless true that discoveries such as today's have a powerful impact on our lives, on our worldview, and therefore also on our religiosity. It is a kind of effect that we can only call “neutralizing” with respect to our lived history. How can we compare the few millennia of human history with the endless horizons of geological eras, the formation of the physical cosmos, and, indeed, the minutes following the Big Bang?"

"Eco is one of the few people I recognize as being more intelligent than me. They don't give him the Nobel Prize only because they already gave it to Dario Fo. But he's sly, he identifies too readily with his social persona as a sacred monster, a national monument. And I get pissed off with him when I see him hanging out with the people from “Libertà e Giustizia” (Freedom and Justice), which is a kind of Red Cross committee. These are balanced gentlemen who are unlikely to be seen in their smocks in Piazza San Giovanni shouting at Berlusconi."

"Stalin imposed the development of heavy industry against agriculture and thence the displacement of people, the sacrifices, the deaths... A crazy dream! But... without the Stalinist industrial force, the Nazis would have won!"

"Soviet communism and Western capitalism share the same crazy ideology: forced industrialization of society."

"I am Christian, therefore I am communist. The first Christian communities were very communist... except that they were expecting the immediate end of the world."

"I propose hermeneutic communism: non-dogmatic communism, weak communism. Only this can save us. [Is is] without essences, without absolutes to be realized at all costs. It is only an ideal of equitable society, a society that progressively weakens violence like dialectics."

"Against the obvious dictatorship of the globalist bourgeoisie we have to develop the idea of a proletarian dictatorship, that nobody has to fear, since it's the only true democracy for the people."

"Greta is built in a laboratory! She has the proper face, the proper pigtails, the proper illness, she is properly little... She and all her family settled down forever, but it is evident that they are used. After two days she shook hands with miss Christine Lagarde, who leads the IMF. She is pure laboratory creation."

"They told us that after 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 1991, with the hauling down of the red flag from the Kremlin, the "end of history" had come, that capitalism had won and that it was the only possible path to follow. We have seen in this 20 years that it isn't so."

"Fascism is used by the bourgeoisie when the latter consider itself no longer able to fight off the peril of a socialist revolution. Fascism is, therefore, organic to the logics of capitalism and represents a more authoritarian handling that bosses temporary use, when necessary, in order to maintain their rule."

"Gualtieri is just a mere political enforcer of the will of banks and big finance. Direct expression of the economic powers that supported his appointment, he is the representative of the most hostile elements to the workers, their interests and their aspirations."

"Thank to God I am uncertain, or even an atheist – not an idolater, not truth-dependent... And then, an existence full of certainty, how boring. A bit like the traditional Paradise: tota simul ac perfecta possessio. But please. Instead, what? Open historicity, which is the true meaning of creationism. We are not manifestations of a geometrically demonstrated structure; the rationality we encounter in the world is only a “fact”, a contingent, historical product, which, as such – with our experience of choices, alternatives projects with successes and failures – of ex-sistence, that is – attests to the contingent, free nature of my origin. I call God the act of original freedom from which my freedom comes, and which I certainly cannot prove with the five Thomistic ways or with any other deductive method. Even Descartes does not prove it. And Immanuel Kant can only imagine eternal life as a continuation of the struggle for good, that is, as history."

"I am a marxist, a leninist and I don't even consider disagreeable Stalin, who saved us from Hitler, more than the United States."

"Cecchi Paone is a kind of right-wing aunt. I don't dislike him. I don't like him, but not because he's right-wing. If Robert Redford were right-wing, I'd still like him. Cecchi Paone, honestly... I don't even like Rizzo . But when Rizzo's name comes up in gay clubs, everyone."

"Well, if I hadn't been gay, I would never have embarked on this profound reflection on the non-normativity of natural essences, which constitutes the soul of weak thought. So, even if it's not a particularly gay philosophy, I believe there are important connections."

"My mother was a widow and I am gay, but I know many other children of widowed mothers who, despite the absence of their fathers, did not become gay. After all, I am convinced that almost anything is better for a child than an orphanage. Nor can one pursue the perfect family balance. It is enough that the adoptive parents are normal, civilized people, not sadists who cut up children, and that they have an income to support them, without necessarily having to be part of the Agnelli family."

"A historical and ideological fact that I consider almost a "proof" of loyalty in the bolshevism ideals: the matter of Stalin. Distrust those who disparage or even forget the figure of the continuer of Lenin's work, who was able to build socialism in the USSR and defeat the Nazi beast."

"They're building armoured skyscrapers in New York, every flat costs 100 billions euros. We're going towards a new middle-age: there'll be fortresses with rich chinese, russians, indians, arabians, americans inside, while the rest of the world will live in a new dark age."