Oriana Fallaci Quotes

Finally [Indira Ganhi] called a beautiful dark little boy who was playing on the lawn, and embracing him tenderly, murmured, 'This is my grandchild; this is the man I love most in the world.' It was a strange sensation to watch this very powerful woman embracing a child.

And yet, or just for this reason, it's so fascinating to be a woman. It's an adventure that takes such courage, a challenge that's never boring. You'll have so many things to engage you if you're born a woman. To begin with, you'll have to struggle to maintain that if God exists he might even be an old woman with white hair or a beautiful girl. Then you'll have to struggle to explain that it wasn't sin that was born on the day when Eve picked an apple, what was born that day was a splendid virtue called disobedience.

The more democratic and open a society is, the more it's exposed to terrorism. The more a country is free, not governed by a police regime, the more it risks hijackings or massacres like the ones that took place for many years in Italy and Germany and other parts of Europe.

America is God equals America equals Business equals America equals God.

Arafat contradicts himself every five minutes. He always plays the double-cross, lies even if you ask him what time it is.

Objectivity does not exist - it cannot exist!.. The word is a hypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: Sometimes truth stays on one side only.

You cannot survive if you do not know the past.

I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion.

Whether 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 phenomenon.

Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam. And Italy is an outpost of that province, a stronghold of that colony... In each of our cities lies a second city: a Muslim city, a city run by the Quran. A stage in the Islamic expansionism.

Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?

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.

How do you dare to ask me for a solution? It's like asking Seneca for a solution. You remember what he did? He committed suicide!

Glory is a heavy burden, a murdering poison, and to bear it is an art. And to have that art is rare.

When my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him. My mother found him at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste.

The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom.

[Indira Gandhi] answered cautiously at first. Then she opened up like a flower and the conversation flowed along without obstacles, in mutual sympathy.

Henry Kissinger may have wished I had presented him as a combination of Charles DeGaulle and Disraeli, but I didn't....out of respect for DeGaulle and Disraeli. I described him as a cowboy because that is how he describes himself. If I were a cowboy I would be offended.

I always introduce myself as an encyclopedia of defects which I do not deny. Why should I? It took me a whole life to build myself as I am.

I am disgusted by the anti-Semitism of many Italians, of many Europeans.

I'm going to show you the real New York - witty, smart, and international - like any metropolis. Tell me this: where in Europe can you find old Hungary, old Russia, old France, old Italy? In Europe you're trying to copy America, you're almost American. But here you'll find Europeans who immigrated a hundred years ago - and we haven't spoiled them. Oh, Gio! You must see why I love New York. Because the whole world's in New York.

I've found what I was looking for, Child: what people call love between a man and a woman is a season. And if, at its flowering, this season is a feast of greenery, at its waning, it's only a heap of rotting leaves.

Sometimes the dead are more alive than the living. And they can kill the living.

Journalism is an extraordinary and terrible privilege. Not by chance, if you are aware of it, does it consume you with a hundred feelings of inadequacy. Not by chance, when I find myself going through an event or an important encounter, does it seize me like anguish, a fear of not having enough eyes and enough ears and enough brains to look and listen and understand like a worm hidden in the wood of history.

I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.

Life is such an effort, Child. It's a war that is renewed each day, and its moments of joy are brief parentheses for which you pay a cruel price.

I've always disliked kamikazes, that is, people who commit suicide in order to kill others. Starting with the Japanese ones from World War II. I never considered them Pietro Miccas who torch the powder and go up with the citadel in order to block the arrival of the enemy troops at Torino. I never considered them soldiers.

[Indira Gandhi] looked tired that day, and all of a sudden I exclaimed, 'Deep down I don't envy you, and I shouldn't like to be in your place.' And she said, 'The problem is not in the problems I have, it's in the idiots around me. Democracy, you know...' I now wonder what she meant by that unfinished phrase.

Instead of learned young people we have donkeys with University degrees. Instead of future leaders we have mollusks with expensive blue jeans and phony revolutionaries with ski masks. And do you know what? Maybe this is another reason why our Moslem invaders have such an easy game.

I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism.

I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.

A lot of women ask themselves why they should bring a child into the world? So that it will be hungry, so that it will be cold, so that it will be betrayed and humiliated, so that it will be slaughtered by war or disease? They reject the hope that its hunger will be satisfied, its cold warmed, that loyalty and respect will accompany it through life, that it will be a devote a life to the effort to eliminate war and disease.

I didn't want to kill a man. I'm not capable of killing a man. I wanted to kill a tyrant.