"Hearing him speak is so fun, reassuring I dare say. You can say all you like about Sihanouk: that he's an atrocious liar, a madman, a fraud, a swashbuckler, an international blot. You may think that, but you cannot deny how in this age in which the political arena seems to generate only dull, obtuse and boring characters with no imagination, he's a kind of miracle."

"Among today's Italians, when treading upon Haile Selassie's memory, the sense of guilt and shame is such that they react by seeing only his positive traits: the merits of his past actions. His portrayals always brim with excessive deferance, unwarranted admiration and delusion. They go on and on about his priestly composure, his regal dignity, his great intelligence and his generosity towards former adversaries. They never explain who this sovereign, who we made into a victim, really was. They never dare tell us if he was something more, or less, than a victim. For example, that he was an old man hardened in principles which were centuries out of date; that he was the absolute ruler of a nation which has never heard the words rights and democracy, which lives in a near prehistoric fashion in the suburbs, oppressed by hunger, disease, ignorance and the squallor of a feudal regime which even we did not experience during the darkest years of the Medieval period."

"The editor of Il Foglio, [Giuliano Ferrara], is so blinded by his neoconservative ideology that he fails to realise that by promoting Oriana Fallaci's crude anti-Islamic racism, he is paving the way for all other forms of racism and, sooner or later, for a resurgence of anti-Semitism, which will be very difficult to combat if anti-Islamic racism has been endorsed."

"Fallaci is a great journalist for the same reason she is a mediocre novelist. She is an enormous, protruding uterus that embraces a wide swath of reality. But what she gains in breadth when she writes articles, she loses in depth when she writes books."

"With Oriana Fallaci's demise at 77 from a host of cancers, in September, in her beloved Florence, there also died something of the art of the interview. Her absolutely heroic period was that of the 1970s, probably the last chance we had of staving off the complete triumph of celebrity culture."

"Ever since the secret trip to China, my own relationship with Nixon had grown complicated. Until then I had been an essentially anonymous White House assistant. But now his associates were unhappy, and not without reason, that some journalists were giving me perhaps excessive credit for the more appealing aspects of our foreign policy while blaming Nixon for the unpopular moves. . These tendencies were given impetus by an interview I granted to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, without doubt the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press. I saw her briefly on Nov. 2 and 4, 1972, in my office. I did so largely out of vanity. She had interviewed leading personalities all over the world. Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown to me. I paid the price for my naiveté. The quotes ascribed to me, statements of marginal taste gathered together in what she presented as a conversation, were the most self-serving utterances of my entire public career."

"Even though you are on the blacklist of my authorities, I'll add you to the whitelist of my heart."

"Who is this woman? Where does she come from? What does she want? Enough, go away, ça suffit! ça suffit!!"

"L’Europeo considers her its star reporter. She covers the Indo-Pakistani War and the Maoist uprising in Hong Kong. Then she travels to the Middle East to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to South America to write about guerrilla groups fighting against various dictatorships. She quickly becomes famous for her courage and her combative spirit. A colleague remembers: “During the war between India and Pakistan, while we were following the Sikh troops and the Gurkhas, she took a different route. She got on a rickety boat and sailed up the Brahmaputra and arrived in Dacca at the moment the dictator’s troops were killing their prisoners and burying them in common graves. Some were still alive. She made such a fuss that it was a miracle they didn’t shoot her.”"

"Oriana Fallaci is not only a great journalist: for me she is "the" journalism. And I underline "is" (wasn't) for many reasons. One of which lies in the fact that its pages will long remain the best school of journalism, but above all a formidable breath of intellectual freedom, a vaccine against all idiots, variously placed in the hierarchies of power, and against the lazy cowardice of conformism."

"This too famous, too important, too lucky man, whom they call Superman, Superstar, Superkraut, and who stitches together paradoxical alliances, reaches impossible agreements, keeps the world holding its breath as though the world were his students at Harvard."

"The problem is that the solution does not depend upon the death of Osama bin Laden. Because the Osama bin Ladens are too many, by now: as cloned as the sheep of our research laboratories. In fact, the best trained and the more intelligent do not stay in the Muslim countries... They stay in our own countries, in our cities, our universities, our business companies. They have excellent bonds with our churches, our banks, our televisions, our radios, our newspapers, our publishers, our academic organizations, our unions, our political parties. Worse, they live in the heart of a society that hosts them without questioning their differences, without checking their bad intentions, without penalizing their sullen fanaticism."

"Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense... I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion... I am disgusted by the anti-Semitism of many Italians, of many Europeans... Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don't know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don't even know who Cavour was!... Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty... State-run television stations contribute to the resurgent anti-Semitism, crying only over Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over them in unwilling tones... The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom... The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization... The struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions... The West reveals a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive... These charlatans care about the Palestinians as much as I care about the charlatans. That is not at all... When I was given the news, I laughed. The trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true... President Bush has said, 'We refuse to live in fear.'...Beautiful sentence, very beautiful. I loved it! But inexact, Mr. President, because the West does live in fear. People are afraid to speak against the Islamic world. Afraid to offend, and to be punished for offending, the sons of Allah. You can insult the Christians, the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Jews. You can slander the Catholics, you can spit on the Madonna and Jesus Christ. But, woe betide the citizen who pronounces a word against the Islamic religion."