Foreign Ministers

"Waiting for the implosion [of the government of Romano Prodi] is risking to turn into Waiting for Godot."

"If there are rights or duties of people which are not guaranteed because they're part of a [de facto] union and not of a family, there will be the need of a legislative action to remove the disparity. Obviously, when talking about people I refer to everyone [including homosexuals]."

"If we look at Somalia, Ethiopia and Lybia, to how they're reduced now, and to how they were before, with Italy, I think that this page of history will be rewritten and there will be a positive evaluation of the role of Italy"

"Communism has been the greatest and bloodiest illusion that humanity ever bore"

"Fascism was part of the absolute evil. (...) We have to denounce the ashaming pages in the history of our past. (...) There included all the pages related to the discrimination and the persecution of jews and, more in general, of minoritires. And therefore that one [The Italian Social Republic of Salò] is also included."

"Times are ripe to discuss about the vote right, at least on an administrative level, for immigrant persons."

"After 1994, we did many things. We had Fiuggi, there was a confrontation. I'd say that today one cannot say it for sure. Today, I would not say it again [that Mussolini was the greatest political leader of the century.]"

"If you ask me:"An openly homosexual teacher can work as a teacher? I say no. (...) I'll not do anything to discriminate you, but I'll also not do anything to put your type of relationship on the same level of the natural family."

"I think the Mussolinean institution of a third way alternative to communism is currently still very relevant."

"Mussolini was the greatest political leader of the century."

"Good government can be no substitute for self-government."

"I'm putting it to you and to all of my critics, if you can find any Asian leader in any Asian country of whatever political persuasion who doesn't subscribe to the immigration views of New Zealand First, then name that person now. None of you can, all the way to Turkey."

"We have now reached the point where you can wander down Queen Street in Auckland and wonder if you are still in New Zealand or some other country."

"We are being colonised without New Zealanders having some say in the numbers of people coming in and where they are coming from. This is a deliberate policy of ethnic engineering and re-population."

"A corporate raid on a country is not foreign investment. It's just a corporate raid. A corporate raid doesn't expand our wealth, our employment, our exports, is not advantageous to most economies and most economies understand that. In New Zealand we did not. Everything that came from overseas was regarded as foreign investment, when, in fact, it was often a downsizing of the operation, a break-up of the operation and a mass of sackings."

"We believe that those people who make efforts to free their countries should not be regarded as terrorists."

"Canada has committed horrible, yet modern, violations against its natives, and for the first time, we have now drafted a U.N. resolution regarding this issue."

"The United States must accept the responsibilities arising from the occupation of Iraq, and should not finger point or put the blame on others."

"We belong to the same Slav people."

"Democracy is a means of achieving a higher level of individual and collective gratification, welfare, peace, stability and prosperity. It is not an end in itself! Practitioners of democracy in the Pacific should therefore be pragmatic in their approach. An idealistic and a purist approach is, I believe, misplaced."

"It's really a therapeutic experience for me to begin to write about the coup because I was involved in the 1987 coup and in particular the 2000 coup. For someone who was involved in all the coups it has been difficult for me to open up and write. The fact that I am able to write marks a turning point for me."

"But in the Middle Ages people were convinced there were witches. They looked for them and they certainly found them."

"There was a very consistent creation of a virtual reality, and eventually it collided with our old-fashioned, ordinary reality."

"But tarring the Blix-led inspection mission ranked as a high priority for war enthusiasts on the Bush team who were eager to pressure Blix into becoming more confrontational with the Iraqi government and perhaps to lay groundwork for discounting his future reports to the Security Council. Key rightwing media voices were warbling from the same songbook. “We hope that as the days unfold Mr. Blix understands that his own credibility is as much on the line as Saddam Hussein’s,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized on November 22, adding darkly that “Mr. Blix has his own track record in Iraq, and it doesn’t inspire confidence that he will go to the mat to disarm the dictator. The question now is whether the seventy-four-year-old Swedish diplomat is going to let Saddam make a fool of him and the U.N. one more time.” The Journal’s editorial page, often the source of opening salvos that quickly resound in the national media echo chamber, was just getting started. Two editions later, a long top-of-thepage attack appeared under the headline “Hans the Timid.” As if to be graphic about Blix’s dubious character, the drawing that accompanied the op-ed article showed him wearing a tie with a peace sign on it"

"He's as reliable as a Volvo."

"Personally, Mr. Blix is amiable and has a sense of humor; politically he is weak and easily fooled. I can think of few European officials less suitable for a showdown with Saddam. Indeed, it is with utter disbelief that I watch television news about Mr. Blix's negotiations with the Iraqi dictator's henchmen. [...] Regardless of how this crisis develops from this point, the United Nations has neglected its duties by asking a wimp to lead the inspectors who are supposed to stand up to the brute of Baghdad."

"It was to do with information management. The intention was to dramatise it."

"I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could — with 100 per cent certainty — know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were."

"I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media."

"… there are people in this administration who say they don't care if the UN sinks under the East river, and other crude things…"

"It's true the Iraqis misbehaved and had no credibility but that doesn't necessarily mean that they were in the wrong."

"Silence is the only answer you should give to the fools. Where ignorance speaks, intelligence should not give advices."

"Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State."

"Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State . . . . It is opposed to classical Liberalism . . . . Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual."

"Fascism establishes the real equality of individuals before the nation… the object of the regime in the economic field is to ensure higher social justice for the whole of the Italian people… What does social justice mean? It means work guaranteed, fair wages, decent homes, it means the possibility of continuous evolution and improvement. Nor is this enough. It means that the workers must enter more and more intimately into the productive process and share its necessary discipline… As the past century was the century of capitalist power, the twentieth century is the century of power and glory of labour."

"It is no longer economy aiming at individual profit, but economy concerned with collective interest."

"I am not a collector of deserts!"

"Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil and Augustus."

"The order of the day is this: Within a few decades all peasants and farm workers must possess large, healthful houses, in which the rural generations can live through the centuries, in which the race will find a secure foundation. Only thus is it possible to combat the poisons of urbanism, only thus is it possible to bring back to the villages and fields the deluded peasants who have followed the urban mirage of money wages and easy diversions."

"The Truth Apparent, apparent to everyone's eyes who are not blinded by dogmatism, is that men are perhaps weary of liberty. They have a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer the virgin, chaste and severe, to be fought for … we have buried the putrid corpse of liberty … the Italian people are a race of sheep."

"I don't like the look of him."

"Three-fourths of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state. And if I dare to introduce to Italy state capitalism or state socialism, which is the reverse side of the medal, I will have the necessary subjective and objective conditions to do it."

"At a given moment the worker, the tiller of the soil, must be able to say to himself and to his family: "If I am really better off today it is due to the institutions that the Fascist Revolution has created.""

"Italy is not a capitalist country according to the meaning now conventionally assigned to that term."

"To-day we can affirm that the capitalistic method of production is out of date. So is the doctrine of laissez-faire, the theoretical basis of capitalism… To-day we are taking a new and decisive step in the path of revolution. A revolution, in order to be great, must be a social revolution."

"Comrade Tassinari was right in stating that for a revolution to be great, for it to make a deep impression on the life of the people and on history, it must be a social revolution."

"The question is often asked in America and in Europe just how much ‘Fascism’ the American President’s program contains. Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices, having recognized that the welfare of the economy is identical with the welfare of the people. Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism. More than that cannot be said at the moment."

"The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people."

"Inside every anarchist is a failed dictator."

"I have no love for the Jews, but they have great influence everywhere. It is better to leave them alone. Hitler's antisemitism has already brought him more enemies than is necessary."