Find first peace within yourself. Don't eat too much. Keep your brain active. Love.

It's not enough what I did in the past - there is also the future.

I should thank Mussolini for having declared me to be of an inferior race. This led me to the joy of working, not any more unfortunately, in university institutes but in a bedroom.

At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin.

Progress depends on our brain. The most important part of our brain, that which is neocortical, must be used to help others and not just to make discoveries.

After a short period spent in Brussels as a guest of a neurological institute, I returned to Turin on the verge of the invasion of Belgium by the German army, Spring 1940, to join my family. The two alternatives left then to us were either to emigrate to the United States, or to pursue some activity that needed neither support nor connection with the outside Aryan world where we lived. My family chose this second alternative. I then decided to build a small research unit at home and installed it in my bedroom.

Babies did not attract me, and I was altogether without the maternal sense so highly developed in small and adolescent girls.