Defense Ministers

"I declare that henceforth capital and labor shall have equal rights and duties as brothers in the fascist family."

"We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them."

"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."

"If the 19th was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state."

"Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State."

"For Fascism, the growth of Empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; any renunciation is a sign of decay and of death. Fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude. But Empire demands discipline, the coordination of all forces and a deeply felt sense of duty and sacrifice."

"Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can direct human society. It denies that numbers can govern by means of periodical consultations: It asserts the unavoidable fruitful and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage."

"I want to make my own life a masterpiece."

"Speeches made to the people are essential to the arousing of enthusiasm for a war."

"I admire Lassalle. He was a man of first-class intelligence and endowed with far more imagination than Marx. That was why his vision of the days to come was far less catastrophic than that of Marx."

"There is a great deal of Prussianism in German Socialism. My impression has been that that explains why German Socialists are so disciplined."

"The Fascist State directs and controls the entrepreneurs, whether it be in our fisheries or in our heavy industry in the Val d'Aosta. There the State actually owns the mines and carries on transport, for the railways are state property. So are many of the factories… We term it state intervention… If anything fails to work properly, the State intervenes. The capitalists will go on doing what they are told, down to the very end. They have no option and cannot put up any fight. Capital is not God; it is only a means to an end."

"As long as 1911, when I was still a member of the Socialist Party, I wrote that the Gordian knot of Trent could be cut only by the sword. At the same date I declared that war is usually the prelude to revolution. It was therefore easy for me, when the Great War broke out, to predict the Russian and the German revolutions."

"Here in Italy Socialism was a unifying factor. All Italian historians have recognized this. The Socialists of Italy were advocates of one idea and of one nation. From 1892, when they cut adrift from the anarchists at the Congress of Genoa, down till 1911, they battled for on behalf of a united Italy.”"

"National pride has no need of the delirium of race. Anti-Semitism does not exist in Italy… Whenever things go awry in Germany, the Jews are blamed for it."

"Race! It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today. Amusingly enough, not one of those who have proclaimed the "nobility" of the Teutonic race was himself a Teuton."

"A revolutionist is born, not made."

"I never felt that there was any conflict between my military duties and my Socialism. Why should not a good soldier be also a fighter in the class war?"

"It was inevitable that I should become a Socialist ultra, a Blanquist, indeed a communist. I carried about a medallion with Marx’s head on it in my pocket. I think I regarded it as a sort of talisman… [Marx] had a profound critical intelligence and was in some sense even a prophet."

"The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide; he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, life which should be high and full, lived for oneself, but above all for others — those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after."

"Above all, Fascism, in so far as it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism — born of a renunciation of struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put a man in front of himself in the alternative of life and death."

"Yet the Fascist State is unique, and an original creation. It is not reactionary, but revolutionary, in that it anticipates the solution of the universal political problems which elsewhere have to be settled in the political field by the rivalry of parties, the excessive power of the Parliamentary regime and the irresponsibility of political assemblies."

"When, in the now distant March of 1919, I summoned a meeting at Milan through the columns of the Popolo d'Italia of the surviving members of the Interventionist Party who had themselves been in action, and who had followed me since the creation of the Fascist Revolutionary Party (which took place in January of 1915)."

"A unanimous, universally-accepted theory of Socialism did not exist after 1905, when the revisionist movement began in Germany under the leadership of Bernstein, which under pressure of the tendencies of the time, a Left Revolutionary movement also appeared, which though never getting further than talk in Italy, in Russian Socialistic circles laid the foundations of Bolshevism."

"The Fascist State has never tried to create its own God, as at one moment Robespierre and the wildest extremists of the Convention tried to do; nor does it vainly seek to obliterate religion from the hearts of men as does Bolshevism: Fascism respects the God of the ascetics, of the saints, of the heroes, and also God as seen and prayed to by the simple and primitive heart of the people."

"I am proud to be your friend, your brother, your leader. ... The Government looks on the peasants, in war and in peace, as the fundamental forces on which the country relies for its success. ... As between the city and the village, I am for the village. ... The time for a prevalently urban policy has passed. ... The people who abandon the land are condemned to decadence. ... I have willed that agriculture take first place in the Italian economy."

"Giovanni De Martino is the most important exponent of Italian art, the pride of Italy."

"I had the courage to transform the eight-hours day into a law of the State. Do not despise this victory; do not undervalue it. I have approved all the social and pacifist Conventions of Washington… No exceptional laws were pasted, and the regulation of the Press is not an exceptional law."

"To make a revolution it is not necessary to play the great drama of the area. We have left many dead on the roads to Rome and naturally anybody who deludes himself is a fool. We have the power and we shall hold it. We shall defend it against anybody! The revolution lies in this firm determination to hold power!"

"Social Democracy seems to have a very ambiguous position. First of all one wonders why it is called Social Democracy. A democracy is already necessarily social; we think, however that this Social Democracy is a kind of Trojan horse which holds within it an army against whom we shall always be at war."

"Not only this, but we affirm, and on the strength of recent Socialist literature, which you ought not to repudiate, that the real history of capitalism is beginning now, because capitalism is not only a system of oppression, but a selection of that which is of most worth, a co-ordination of hierarchies, a more strongly developed sense of individual responsibility. So true is this that Lenin, after having instituted the building councils, abolished them and put in dictators; so true is it that, after having nationalised commerce, he reintroduced the regime of liberty; and as you who have been in Russia well know, after having suppressed—even physically—the bourgeoisie, to-day he summons it back, because without capitalism and its technical system of production, Russia could never rise again."

"Our position is different as regards the Socialist Party. In the first place we are careful to make a distinction between party Socialism and the Socialism of Labour."