But here's what I've learned in this war, in this country, in this city: to love the miracle of having been born.
Oriana FallaciI met Indira Gandhi in her office in the government palace. The same office that had been her father's - large, cold and plain. She was sitting, small and slender, behind a bare desk. When I entered, she got up and came forward to give me her hand, then sat down again and cut the preliminaries short by fixing me with a gaze that meant: Go ahead with the first question, don't waste time, I really have no time to waste.
Oriana FallaciWithout Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion.
Oriana FallaciThe 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.
Oriana FallaciThe moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.
Oriana FallaciWe are an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century
Oriana FallaciI’ll parade with those who are alone like me. They exist. They are very few, but they exist. I’ll find them.
Oriana FallaciEurope 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.
Oriana FallaciIt brought back to mind the injustice I spoke of, the solitude that oppresses women intent on defending their own destinies, their own dreams, their own mistakes.
Oriana FallaciTo be good or bad doesn't count: life out in this world doesn't depend on that. It depends on a relation of forces based on violence. And survival is violence. You'll wear leather shoes because someone has killed a cow and skinned it to make leather.
Oriana FallaciI know ours is a world made by men for men, their dictatorship is so ancient it even extends to language.
Oriana FallaciAmerica's vulnerability comes precisely from its strength, its wealth, its power and its modernity. It's the usual story of the dog chasing its own tail.
Oriana FallaciSometimes I ask myself whether [Indira Gandhi] had, even then, a certain contempt for the system she represented and, years later, would overthrow.
Oriana FallaciBesides the things I asked [Indira Gandhi], she told me about her son Rajiv, who is married to an Italian girl and is a pilot for Air India, then of her younger son Sanjay, who is an automobile designer and still a bachelor.
Oriana FallaciThere are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape.
Oriana FallaciIf a man is a man and not a sheep in the flock, he has a survival instinct in him that leads him to fight even if he realizes he's fighting in vain, even if he knows he will lose.
Oriana FallaciI defend Israel's right to exist, to defend themselves, to not let themselves be exterminated a second time.
Oriana FallaciKhomeini was not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king - a real leader.
Oriana FallaciWhat's the point anyway - Of suffering, dying? It teaches us to live, boy. A man who does not struggle does not live, he survives.
Oriana FallaciOne day you and I will have to have a little talk about this business called love. I still don't understand what it's all about. My guess is that it's just a gigantic hoax, invented to keep people quiet and diverted. Everyone talks about love: the priests, the advertising posters, the literati, and the politicians, those of them who make love. And in speaking of love and offering it as a panacea for every tragedy, they would and betray and kill both body and soul.
Oriana FallaciI have reached the conclusion that those who have physical courage also have moral courage. Physical courage is a great test.
Oriana FallaciI find it shameful that in nearly all the universities of Europe, Palestinian students sponsor and nurture anti-Semitism.
Oriana FallaciWar is something Arafat sends others to do for him. That is, the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent caused the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Clinton's mediation.
Oriana FallaciLove isn’t putting chain on someone who wants to struggle and is ready to die for it, love is letting him die in the way he’s chosen.
Oriana FallaciHave you ever thought that war is a madhouse and that everyone in the war is a patient?
Oriana FallaciI have never met a man more shy than Clark Gable. He was so shy, you couldn't make him talk.
Oriana FallaciYou wear yourself out in the pursuit of wealth or love or freedom, you do everything to gain some right, and once it's gained you take no pleasure in it.
Oriana FallaciWhy do the people humiliate themselves by voting? I didn't vote because I have dignity. If I had closed my nose and voted for one of them, I would spit on my own face.
Oriana FallaciYou belong neither to God nor the state nor me. You belong to yourself and no one else.
Oriana FallaciIn the legends that males have invented to explain life, the first human creature is a man named Adam. Eve arrives later, to give him pleasure and cause trouble. In the paintings that adorn churches, God is an old man with a beard, never an old woman with white hair. And all the heroes are males: from Prometheus who discovered fire to Icarus who tried to fly, on down to Jesus whom they call the Son of God and of the Holy Spirit, almost as though the woman giving birth to him were an incubator or a wetnurse.
Oriana FallaciNo matter what system you live under, there is no escaping the law that it's always the strongest, the cruellest, the least generous who win.
Oriana FallaciBut to deny fate is arrogance, to declare that we are the sole shapers of our existence is madness;if you deny fate life becomes the series of missed opportunities, a regret for what never was and could have been, a remorse of what was not done and could have been done, and the present is wasted, twisted into another missed oppurtunity.
Oriana FallaciI'll impose upon you the same arrogance that was imposed on me, and on my mother, my grandmother, my grandmother's mother: all the way back to the first human born of another human being, whether he liked it or not. Probably, if he or she had been allowed to choose, he would have been frightened and answered: No, I don't want to be born. But no one asked their opinion, and so they were born and lived and died after giving birth to another human being who was not asked to choose, and that one did likewise, for millions of years, right down to us.
Oriana FallaciI cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics.
Oriana FallaciTrue power does not need arrogance, a long beard and a barking voice. True power strangles you with silk ribbons, charm and intelligence.
Oriana FallaciWhether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomen. To the same degree that I do not understand power, I do understand those who oppose power, who criticize power, who contest power, especially those who rebel against power imposed by brutality.
Oriana Fallaci