"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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
From the Speech by Alcide De Gasperi at the Paris Peace Conference (August 10. 1946). As quoted in Full text of the speech, seieditrice.com.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alcide_De_Gasperi
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Alcide De Gasperi
Alcide Amedeo Francesco De Gasperi (3 April 1881 – 19 August 1954) was an Italian politician and statesman who founded the Christian Democracy party and served as prime minister of Italy in eight successive coalition governments from 1945 to 1953.
7 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Alcide De Gasperi →
Related Quotes
"The truth must be told whatever the cost."
"There are many who only make a small excursion into politics, as amateurs, and others who regard it, and it is for th…"
"Communism as implemented in the USSR is at the antipodes of Nazism: communism is imbued with Christian brotherhood an…"
"When I see that while Hitler and Mussolini persecuted men because of their race, and invented the appalling anti-Jewi…"
"It is true that the functioning of economic democracy demands disinterestedness, just as that of political democracy …"
"There is in Italy a fourth Party, which may not have many voters, but which is capable of paralysing and rendering fu…"
"However great this addition to the number of facts serving to elucidate the natural history of these most interesting…"
"The apparent function of the Diatomacae in the economy nature, viz. to vivify, as it were, the immensity of the ocean…"
"Castracane was a devout priest as well as an enthusiastic investigator."
"Corruption has always been a constant companion of humankind. After all, Catholic culture itself teaches us: without …"