Friday, March 29, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Indro Montanelli (1909 – 2001)


Italian journalist and historian.
Indro Montanelli
When a nice quote comes to mind, I always attribute it to Montesquieu, or to La Rochefoulcauld. They've never complained.
Montanelli quotes
We must get it through to our heads that the fight against corruption is done in one way only: by changing the Italians, not by changing political parties. Political parties, even the new ones, corrupt themselves, it's inevitable.
Montanelli
Let not the usual abstract arguments be brought to me, like the sacredness of life: no one contests the right of everyone to arrange their own life, I don't see why their own death has to be contested.




Montanelli Indro quotes
Men do not know how to appreciate and measure luck except that of others. Their own never.
Montanelli Indro
I do not want to suffer, I do not have a christian concept of suffering. They tell us that suffering elevates the spirit; no suffering is something that hurts and that's all, it elevates nothing. And therefore I fear suffering. Because with regards to death, I, who in everything believe to be moderate, am absolutely radical. If we have a right to life, we have also a right to death. It rests on us, and it must be regognized the right to choose the when and the how of our own death.
Indro Montanelli quotes
I have never dreamt of contesting the Church her right to remain faithful to herself, meaning to the commandments that come from Doctrine... but that she expects to impose these commandments upon me who do not have the good fortune of being a believer, trying to pour them into civil law in a way that they become obligatory even to us non-believers, is it right? To me it doesn't seem so.
Indro Montanelli
It isn't necessary to be socialists in order to love Pertini. Whatever he says or does, smells of cleanliness, of loyalty and of sincerity.
Montanelli Indro quotes
A country that ignores its own yesterday, of which it knows absolutely nothing and doesn't cure itself of knowing nothing, can't have a tomorrow.
Montanelli
Cynics are all moralists, and merciless too.
Montanelli Indro
Politicians do nothing but ask of us, during every expiration of a legal statute, "a gesture of trust." But here trust is not enough; what's needed is an act of faith.
Indro Montanelli
Certainly, for a newspaper director, to have within arm's reach a Travaglio, about whom every starring actor, supporting cast and extra of Italian political life he is ready upon cold request to provide an inquiry brief refined in the most minute details is a nice comfort. But also a bit unsettling. The day I asked him if in that archive, into which no one is allowed to stick their nose, there were a brief with my name on it, Marco changed the subject.




Indro Montanelli quotes
A real writer [...] looks not in another writer but himself.
Indro Montanelli
This world materialist, hedonist and exhibitionist it doesn't even thrill me; and, considering that he reads me, you/he/she should know him/it. But I would want to know the system that you have in mind, and don't have the courage or the ability to propose. A Franciscan world? Beautiful: but looked around you, and tell me if you see a saio. A revised and correct communism? It would make the end of the other, even if he/she won't succeed in repeating its disasters. Believe me G.: the only acceptable social and economic system today, in West, it is that based on the market: a checked capitalism and moderate, to intend us. It is desirable that it may also correct: and not this always happens, it is true. The trouble is that the capitalism is served as the capitalists - and those, must admit, they are often difficult to be digested. You don't try to confuse me the ideas, therefore. You won't succeed us. I probably have three times his/her years, and I have seen where they conduct these generic pulls against "the multinationals": sooner or later, someone will depose the bar and he/she will take the gun. I forgot: I sign my opinions, she throws the stone and it hides the hand. All brave ones so, you boys of Seattle?
Montanelli quotes
Which ever one of you will want to become a journalist, let him remember to choose his own master: the reader.
Montanelli Indro
[Gladio] had been founded in almost all the Countries that belonged to the Nato, and for wish of the Nato, aware that her European partners would not have been able to withstand the attack of a Power superarmata qual it was the Soviet union: they would have had to wait, for receives it the intervention of America. The fact shows that when this plan was revealed, any other Country found nothing to repeat of it. Only us Italian - the usual novelists imbeciles and worse that imbeciles - made subject of it of scandal and pretext of "yellow" that they still find credit, as its letter shows. Also I feel me scandalized, and an a little offended. But only from the fact that nobody has solicited me the adhesion to the Gladio: I would have given her with enthusiasm.
Montanelli Indro quotes
Italian husbands, in order to buy their wives a fur, spend more than all their European collegues.
Indro Montanelli
The parties had finally put the wrong man at the wrong place. De Mita was not without his qualities. But they all became defects when endowed by the duties of a goverment. It was seen when he was minister, and was accomplishing little: and that little bit, usually, would have been better had he not accomplished it.
Indro Montanelli quotes
The American death penalty exists and it withstands in America because it was a basic and constitutive element of its birth and development. Of the famous 102 «Wandering Fathers» that for first they disembarked from the «Mayflower» in that Continent not to ransack the wealths as they made Spaniards and Portuguese in Mexico and in America of the South, but to build you a new and free society, around the two bystanders they were leftovers of jail that ran away the Justice and the jails of Europe, and a bystander they were men that liberty looked for, and above all that religious. The first ones had in pocket the gun, the seconds the Bible, but in his/her Calvinist version that of the retaliation, based on the conception of a God executioner that demands the death of whom without correct motive it gives it.
Indro Montanelli
Depression is a democratic sickness: it afflicts everyone.
Montanelli Indro
I know many crooks and they never preach, but I don't know anyone who preaches that isn't a crook also.


© 2009–2013Quotes Privacy Policy | Contact