Guido Calogero

"The country taxed itself with a new kind of tithe, and the children of Abruzzo had to feed themselves even less than before, to prevent the blond young men of Scotland and the giant blacks of South Africa from starving to death in the caves of Genzana."

"The freedom that must be loved is [...] the freedom of others. Only on this condition is the love of freedom not a selfish aspiration, but a moral idea, indeed the sole and exclusive content of moral experience."

"Anyone who looks through the telescope and sees things differently from me is always someone who can teach me a lot, and I will read it with the attitude of a disciple who wants to understand what is not yet clear to him; if I then discuss their conclusions, I will do so with the respect and gratitude we owe to those who have paved the way for us to go further, evaluating their approach retrospectively on the basis of their arguments, not a priori by comparing their conclusions with my own. This is the attitude that my teacher Guido Calogero taught me to call ‘the will to understand’ or ‘the spirit of dialogue’."

"Take Calogero, for example: secularism is a method of coexistence between all possible ideologies and philosophies, which must respect, as a primary rule, the principle that no one can claim to possess the truth."