Lawyers From Italy

"Albanese's campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated."

"I don't know if you heard about Francesca Albanese (..) US shoud apply sanctions against her. She shouldn't be allowed entering the United States of America. She comes once a month to promote hate, to go to universities, and you know she compared our prime minister Netanyahu to Hitler; and she compare your president to orrible leaders. That's unacceptable and I expect the new administration to be stronger on this issue."

"Francesca Albanese is the good"

"Italian, French and Greek citizens deserve to know that every political action violating the int’l legal order, weakens and endangers all of them. And all of us."

"While political leaders and governments shirk their obligations, far too many corporate entities have profited from Israel’s economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and, now, genocide."

"The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group."

"I call for these top EU officials, and others, to face charges of complicity of war crimes over their support for Israel’s 19 month of assault on Gaza. This cannot be met with impunity."

"I will not give time to people who use the label of antisemitism to attack those who criticise Israel for its appalling human rights records – those people are not concerned with addressing real antisemitism, which is something that very much exists and is revolting."

"I do believe that the ICC arrest warrants constitute a historical decision. It is the first time that (these are against) leaders who are considered Western, because Israel is part of the Western bloc … It is important to advance the application of international law, especially when there are atrocity crimes."

"Finally, I had followed the surprising career of Piersanti Mattarella [brother of the Italian President Mattarella]. His career developed in the shadow of his powerful father Bernardo, who was a minister several times and a great collector of votes and friendships, some of which were compromising, in Castellammare del Golfo, in western Sicily, home to the most ruthless mafia. [...] We must not betray our origins if they have brought us privileges and benefits. And Piersanti had unfortunately forgotten that he was the eldest son of Bernardo and his vows."

"Thank you very much Mr President (Xi Jinping) for such a warm and friendly welcome. I am delighted to meet you again. I have wonderful memories of my first visit to China, seven years ago, and of your visit to Italy five years ago. I am still grateful to you for visiting my Region, Sicily. I considered it a gesture of friendship for which I am grateful to you. When we met in Rome you asked me to return to China in the year we celebrated 50 years of diplomatic relations. Unfortunately what happened later with the pandemic, with the suffering we all suffered, prevented us from doing so. But since friendship is also about remembrance, it is about keeping commitments and keeping promises, I am happy to be here again in China to reaffirm our friendship, our desire for growing cooperation."

"The Council of Europe has always had the vocation of being the “common European home” and has been able to develop his vocation in the decades since its creation, as its current broad representation testifies. A home that, if it has been a faithful mirror of the divisions and difficulties between the different national communities, has also been able to be, above all, an expression of Europe’s courage for unity, often foreshadowing what could later be built, in other respects and in other areas, such as the European Union."

"War is a voracious monster, never satiated."

"Peace does not impose itself automatically, by itself, but is the result of the will of men."

"The Pope has placed before us a beautiful goal, this universal brotherhood, which logically, includes women and men, for Saint Francis did not exclude anyone! It is a commitment that begins to daily life, in the relationships that each of us have, and then extends it to the areas of professional or social commitment where we find ourselves, at whatever level. Logically, in the current situation, this is not easy, we cannot hide it and be naïve, but we have a goal and a great hope, for which we are also responsible. Moreover, I have faith that if we try to do our small part, God will do the rest if we let Him."

"In the international community, the Holy See also has the mission of ensuring that the interdependence between people and nations be developed in a moral and ethical dimension, as well as in the other dimensions and various aspects that relations are acquiring in today's world. One must never tire of encouraging dialogue at all levels, always seeking diplomatic solutions."

"Un magistrato deve essere imparziale quando esercita le sue funzioni ma io confesso che non mi sento del tutto imparziale. Anzi, mi sento partigiano, sono un partigiano della Costituzione."

"(About the ideal government) I am a candidate for Prime Minister, so I will be the president of the Council and also take on the role of interim Minister of Justice. Travaglio would be an excellent choice for the Ministry of Information, as he is outside the political sphere, while I would put Fiorella Mannoia in charge of Culture. Then I would put the economist w:it:Vladimiro Giacché in charge of the Economy, a worker in charge of Labor, and a police officer in charge of the Interior. We need competent people, not like Castelli, who was an engineer, and Carfagna, let's not even go there..."

"Today we have a more civilized mafia and a more mafia-like society. A mafia that increasingly wears suits and ties and a society that changes its clothes too many times a day and chooses to disguise itself. In short, we have entire sections of society that have now internalized the behavioral models of mafiosi. And you can see it in all areas."

"Azione Civile è un movimento civico puro, fuori dai partiti, che oggi avvia una campagna di adesione aperta ai cittadini che credono in questo progetto per radicarsi sul territorio."

"(About the law on the so-called “short trial”) Should be defined as: the law of the short death of trials. It is right to ensure speedy trials, but here we have a trial that remains long and only sets a maximum time limit that can never be met. We need a reform of the justice system that shortens the timeframes but gives the judiciary human and operational resources and funding. There are 30 percent shortages in the public prosecutor's offices in Palermo and Catania, cuts in funding for overtime for staff and court clerks. Hearings are only held in the morning. At full speed, the timeframes would be halved."

"(About the takeover of the ‘Why Not’ investigation) De Magistris calls it illegitimate, I call it unthinkable. [...] My feeling is that we found ourselves in a situation where autonomy and independence, both internal and external, reached a breaking point. We are truly in a moment of crisis for the rule of law."

"For some time now, the Constitution has been under attack in some fundamental areas. The autonomy and independence of the judiciary has been under constant siege for years, as has the principle of equality. Article 3 of the Constitution, thanks in part to an upright judiciary, has not remained an abstract principle. All the most recent bills, however, aim to create a two-tiered justice system: efficient and harsh with the weak, soft and sluggish with the powerful. A justice system that ensures impunity for the powerful."

"As far as we have been able to ascertain, De Magistris' investigation went far beyond what has become widely known. It went well beyond the wiretapping of Clemente Mastella or the inclusion of Romano Prodi in the register of suspects. I believe that the core of the investigation was precisely the intertwining of criminal powers and other powers in the area. I believe that his case cannot be addressed without taking into account the reality in which De Magistris, often in institutional isolation, operated."

"The union between occult powers and the mafia is the famous “big game” that Giovanni Falcone was working on. And for which he probably died: and the real instigators of the Capaci bombing have never been found."

"I would define the case De Magistris as emblematic of what happens when a magistrate finds himself isolated and overexposed, managing an extremely complex and delicate investigation into a tangle of legal and illegal interests involving diverse individuals and circles, on the cusp where criminal, political, and institutional spheres meet. As often happens in areas where integrated criminal systems operate. And I am referring, of course, to the criminal systems associated with the mafia in Sicily and the 'ndrangheta in Calabria."

"Borsellino once, we were at his house in Marsala one evening, so before he even arrived in Palermo, I remember it clearly even though he didn't give me any precise explanations about it, he said to me, and I quote: "w:it:Pietro Giammanco is a man of Lima," a statement that obviously upset me."

"(About Pietro Grasso) He was a magistrate of great experience, courage, and professional ability, but it must be remembered that he became national anti-Mafia prosecutor thanks to a law passed ad personam by Silvio Berlusconi, which excluded Gian Carlo Caselli, who had more qualifications than Pietro Grasso. Grasso himself said in a famous interview that the Berlusconi government deserved a special award for its anti-Mafia activities. Pietro Grasso is certainly not left-wing, nor has he ever been in his brief forays into politics. Even when Caselli was appointed prosecutor of Palermo in 1992, Grasso was his opponent, the candidate of the then Minister of Justice Martelli. Therefore, he did not have a left-wing position, as the founders of Liberi e Uguali do. He was then supported by the Berlusconi government against Caselli. [...] Grasso has always taken a very cautious stance on many of the Palermo prosecutor's initiatives. He did not want to sign the Palermo prosecutor's appeal against the acquittal of Andreotti in the first instance. When he was my boss, he was very lukewarm about the investigations I had carried out into criminal networks, the State-Mafia negotiations, and the Dell'Utri trial. He has always been a prudent man, legitimately so, but also a cautious magistrate."

"As a people, we have been stripped of monetary sovereignty, but not only monetary sovereignty. We have been stripped of financial sovereignty, we have been stripped of political sovereignty. We are subjects, we are not sovereign in our own country. [...] And this lack of sovereignty, this expropriation of sovereignty, is not an accident, it is not a coincidence. It is part of a precise plan, which is not only Italian [...]. I believe that it is a rearguard battle to say, “We want another Europe, we will build another Europe”: within these institutions and within this Europe, another Europe is impossible. We must tear down this Europe, as it is today, as it is constructed, with its institutions and the primacy of finance over politics that has been established. [...] We must withdraw from the European treaties."

"In truth, he was neither anarchist nor Jacobin, nor even Revolutionist, but a calm and serene teacher and leader, a prophet possessed with a faith and absorbed in an object, who swayed men by the force of his ideas, the holiness of his life, and the unique loftiness of his character steadily onward towards an end which was not always theirs... This influence, rising in some cases to an ascendancy such as has hardly been given to the greatest religious teachers, was employed unswervingly for his single end, and it was employed successfully. Cavour made Italy, but it was due to Mazzini, and not to Cavour, that such making was possible."

"Inexorable as to principles, tolerant and impartial as to persons."

"The epoch of individuality is concluded, and it is the duty of reformers to initiate the epoch of association. Collective man is omnipotent upon the earth he treads."

"Art does not imitate, but interpret. It searches out the idea lying dormant in the symbol, in order to present the symbol to men in such form as to enable them to penetrate through it to the idea. Were it otherwise, what would be the use or value of art?"

"Nature is for art the garb of the Eternal. The real is the finite expression and representation of the true ; forms are the limits affixed by time and space to the power of life. Nature, reality, and form, should, all of them, be so rendered and expressed by art, as to reveal to mankind some ray of the truth — a vaster and profounder sentiment of life."

"Art is not the fancy or caprice of an individual. It is the mighty voice of God and the universe, as heard by the chosen spirit, and repeated in tones of harmony to mankind. Should that omnipotent voice strike too directly upon the mortal ear, it would stun and suspend all human action, even as Pantheism crushed the ancient Oriental world."

"Art is no isolated, unconnected, or inexplicable phenomenon. It draws its life from the life of the universe, and with the universe it ascends from epoch to epoch towards the Almighty. It owes its power over the souls of men to that collective life — even as the trees and plants draw their life from earth, the common mother; and its power would be destroyed should it attempt to forsake its source."

"Ideas grow quickly when watered with the blood of martyrs."

"The mother's first kiss teaches the child love; the first holy kiss of the woman he loves teaches man hope and faith in life."

"Every mission constitutes a pledge of duty. Every man is bound to consecrate his every faculty to its fulfilment. He will derive his rule of action from the profound conviction of that duty."

"One sole God; One sole ruler, — his Law; One sole interpreter of that law — Humanity."

"Hope nothing from foreign governments. They will never be really willing to aid you until you have shown that you are strong enough to conquer without them."

"Your first duties-first as regards importance-are, as I have already told you, towards Humanity. You are men before you are either citizens or fathers. If you do not embrace the whole human family in your affection, if you do not bear witness to your belief in the Unity of that family, consequent upon the Unity of God...if, wheresoever a fellow-creature suffers, or the dignity of human nature is violated by falsehood or tyranny-you are not ready, if able, to aid the unhappy, and do not feel called upon to combat, if able, for the redemption of the betrayed or oppressed-you violate your law of life, you comprehend not that Religion which will be the guide and blessing of the future."

"Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the Idea to which it gives birth; it is the Thought of love, the sense of communion which unites in one all the sons of that territory."

"So long as a single one amongst your brothers has no vote to represent him in the development of the national life, so long as a single man, able and willing to work, languishes in poverty through want of work to do, you have no country in the sense in which country ought to exist-the country of all and for all."

"So long as you are ready to die for Humanity, the life of your country is immortal."

"The new claim on the part of the toiling multitude, the new sense of responsibility on the part of the well-to-do, arise in reality from the same source. They are in fact the same “social compunction,” and, in spite of their widely varying manifestations, logically converge into the same movement. Mazzini once preached, “the consent of men and your own conscience are two wings given you whereby you may rise to God.” It is so easy for the good and powerful to think that they can rise by following the dictates of conscience by pursuing their own ideals, leaving those ideals unconnected with the consent of their fellowmen."

"I encountered the influence of Mazzini, which was a source of great comfort to me...To me personally the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Mazzini's birth was a matter of great interest. Throughout the world that day Italians who believed in a United Italy came together. They recalled the hopes of this man who, with all his devotion to his country, was still more devoted to humanity and who dedicated to the workingmen of Italy, an appeal so philosophical, so filled with a yearning for righteousness, that it transcended all national boundaries and became a bugle call for "The Duties of Man.""

"Mazzini despised the compromises of the "whigs" and would have no truck with the diplomacy of a Cavour. Yet he came to admit that the programme of insurrections upon which he built his faith implied the sacrifice of a generation. Disdaining immediate objects, reaching far into the future—working for all or nothing—he pointed to the reward that would be enjoyed not by his contemporaries, not by their children perhaps, but at least (let us say) by their grandchildren. Unfortunately, at this very point—in the passage from one generation to another—history seems in a particular way to intervene and to deflect the results of human endeavour; so that we may doubt whether this attempt to overreach Time itself is the proper kind of far-sightedness to have in politics. Apart from new factors that may change the course of the story, there is a process which may give efficacy to the ideas of a Mazzini precisely in so far as these ideas can be made to serve the cause of power; and it is not entirely irrelevant that though Mazzini was no Fascist he did attack the individualism of 1789, and he taught young men to sink themselves—to intoxicate themselves—in the Organic People. One of the things that may happen therefore in the transition to a new generation is the possibility that Mazzini's whole doctrine—and his glorification of nationality—when mixed with a little earth and entangled in a world of tricks and chances, will form but the raw material for the next Mussolini that may arise."

"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."

"I doubt whether any man of his generation exercised so profound an influence on the destinies of Europe as did Mazzini. The map of Europe as we see it to-day is the map of Joseph Mazzini. He was the prophet of free nationality, but free nationality based on right, based above all on duty—the rights and duties of individuals, the rights and duties of races, the rights and duties and ideals of humanity."