Benito Mussolini

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (29 July 1883 – 28 April 1945) was the prime minister of Italy under Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, from 1922 until 1943, when he was overthrown; he then became the leader of the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945.

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• The national flag is a rag that should be placed in a dunghill.
  • During his youth as a socialist, as quoted in Cracking the AP European History Exam, Kenneth Pearl (2008)

• We deny the existence of two classes, because there are many more than two classes. We deny that human history can be explained in terms of economics. We deny your internationalism. That is a luxury article which only the elevated can practise, because peoples are passionately bound to their native soil.
  We affirm that the true story of capitalism is now beginning, because capitalism is not a system of oppression only, but is also a selection of values, a coordination of hierarchies, a more amply developed sense of individual responsibility.
  • Speech (21 June 1921),

• If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth ... then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity... From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for hmself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.
  • Diuturna [The Lasting] (1921) as quoted in Rational Man : A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (1962) by H. B. Veatch

• Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.
  • to Edwin L James of the New York Times (1928)

• Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands and an infinite scorn in our hearts.
  • Speech (1928), as quoted in The Great Quotations (1966) by George Seldes, p. 349

• 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 not above all for others — those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after.
  • "The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932)

• Speeches made to the people are essential to the arousing of enthusiasm for a war.
  • Quoted in Talks with Mussolini (1932) by Emil Ludwig

• I owe most to Georges Sorel. This master of syndicalism by his rough theories of revolutionary tactics has contributed most to form the discipline, energy and power of the fascist cohorts.
  • Quoted in The New Inquistions by Arthur Versluis

• Three cheers for the war. Three cheers for Italy's war and three cheers for war in general. Peace is hence absurd or rather a pause in war.
  • Quoted in The Menace of Fascism (1933) by John Strachey, p. 65

• I don't like the look of him.
  • to his aide after Mussolini's first encounter with Hitler (1934), as quoted in The Gathering Storm (1946) by Winston Churchill

• The Truth Apparent, apparent to everyone's eyes how 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.
  • Written statment (1934), quoted in Fascism and Democracy in the Human Mind : A Bridge Between Mind and Society (2006) by Israel W. Charny, p. 23
  • Variant translation: The truth is that men are tired of liberty.
  • Attributed to Mussolini in Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (2007) by Derek Swannson, p. 507; similar remarks are also attributed to Adolf Hitler

• 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.
  • As quoted in The New York Times (11 January 1935)

• 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.
  • Quoted in Peace and the Plain Man (1935) by Norman Angell, p. 14, and in Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and the Resistance in Italy : 1919 to the Present (2004) by Stanislao G. Pugliese, p. 89

• Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.
  • Quoted in Mussolini in the Making (1938) by Gaudens Megaro, p. 326

• Race? It is a feeling, not a reality. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today.
  • As quoted in Dictators and Democrats (1941) by Lawrence A. Fernsworth, p. 68

• Shoot me in the chest.
  • Mussolini's last words (28 April 1945), as quoted in "Mussolini" (2004) by Peter Neville, p. 195

• I shall make my own life a masterpiece.
  • As quoted in "Duce (1922-42)" in TIME magazine (2 August 1943)

• What is freedom? There is no such thing as absolute freedom!
  • As quoted in "Eja! Eja! Alala!" in TIME magazine (23 July 1923)

• Better to live a day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.
  • As quoted in "Duce (1922-42)" in TIME magazine (2 August 1943)

• War is the normal state of the people.
  • As quoted in "Duce (1922-42)" in TIME magazine (2 August 1943)

• If I advance; follow me! if I retreat; kill me! if I die; avenge me!
  • As quoted in "Duce (1922-42)" in TIME magazine (2 August 1943)

• 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.
  • Early opinion of German national socialism. Quoted in Hitler's Ten-year War on the Jews (1946) by the Institute of Jewish Affairs

• Our program is simple: we wish to govern Italy. They ask us for programs but there are already too many. It is not programs that are wanting for the salvation of Italy but men and will power.
  • As quoted in A History of Civilization (1955) by Crane Brinton, John B. Christopher, and Robert Lee Wolff, p. 520

• For my part I prefer fifty thousand rifles to five million votes.
  • As quoted in Benito Mussolini : The Rise and Fall of Il Duce (1965) by Christopher Hibbert, p. 40

• I am not a collector of deserts!
  • As quoted in Duce! : A Biography of Benito Mussolini (1971), by Richard Collier, p. 125

• Liberty is a duty, not a right.
  • As quoted in Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (1991) by Tim Redman, p. 114

• It is humiliating to remain with our hands folded while others write history. It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants. That is what I shall do.
  • As quoted in Famous Lines : A Columbia Dictionary of Familiar Quotations (1997) by Robert Andrews. p. 330

• The Socialists ask what is our program? Our program is to smash the heads of the Socialists.
  • As quoted in "A History of Terrorism" (2001) by Walter Laqueur, p. 71

• War is to man what maternity is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.
  • As quoted in The Military Quotation Book (2002) by James Charlton, p. 2

• Believe, obey, fight.
  • As quoted in Mussolini and Fascism (2003) by Patricia Knight, p. 46

• This is the epitaph I want on my tomb: "Here lies one of the most intelligent animals who ever appeared on the face of the Earth."
  • As quoted in The Book of Italian Wisdom (2003) by Antonio Santi, p. 50

• The struggle between the two worlds [Fascism and Democracy] can permit no compromises. The new cycle which begins with the ninth year of the Fascist regime places the alternative in even greater relief — either we or they, either their ideas or ours, either our State or theirs!
  • As quoted in "Fundamentals of critical argumentation" (2005) by Douglas Walton, p. 243

• Fortunately the Italian people has not yet accustomed itself to eat many times a day, and possessing a modest level of living, it feels deficiency and suffering less.
  • As quoted in Garlic and Oil : Food and Politics in Italy (2006) by Carol F. Helstosky

• All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
  • As quoted in Propaganda and Dictatorship (2007) by Marx Fritz Morstein, p. 48

• Blood alone moves the wheels of history.
  • As quoted in Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (2007) by Derek Swannson, p. 507

Attributed

• "I am making superhuman efforts to educate this people. When they have learnt to obey, they will believe what I tell them."
  • Clive Foss, The Tyrants: 2500 Years of Absolute Power and Corruption, London: Quercus Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1905204965

Misattributed

• The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.
  • Austin O'Malley, in Keystones of Thought (1914), p. 27

Quotes about Mussolini

Alphabetized by author

• The regime had created an imaginary Spartan country, in which all men had to make believe they were heroic soldiers, all women Roman matrons, all children Balilla (the Genoa street urchin who started a revolt against the Austrian garrison in 1746 by throwing one stone). This was done by means of slogans, flags, stirring speeches from balconies, military music, mass meetings, parades, dashing uniforms, medals, hoaxes, and constant distortions of reality. The Italians woke up too late from their artificial dream, those still alive, that is, hungry, desperate, discredited, the object of derision, cornuti e mazziati, or "cuckolded and beaten up," governed as in the past by contemptuous foreigners in a country of smoking ruins and decaying corpses, in which most things detachable had been stolen and women raped.
  • Luigi Barzini, The Europeans, 1983, p. 172

• From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism.
  
  • Alain de Benoist

• What a man! I have lost my heart!... Fascism has rendered a service to the entire world... If I were Italian, I am sure I would have been with you entirely from the beginning of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passion of Leninism.
  • Winston Churchill quote on Mussolini, after a visit to Rome (1927).

• Mussolini is a brilliant thinker whose philosophy, though unorthodox, flows out of the true European tradition. If he is a myth-maker, he is, like Plato's guardians, conscious that "the noble lie" is a lie.
  • Richard Crossman in 1939's Government and the Governed: A History of Political Ideas and Political Practice

• The greatest genius of the modern age.
  • Thomas Edison, as quoted in Pound in Purgatory : From Economic Radicalism to Anti-semitism (1999) by Leon Surette, p. 72

• To Benito Mussolini, from an old man who greets in the ruler, the Hero of Culture.

• • Sigmund Freud, dedication sent with a gift in the form of the book Warum Krieg? he wrote with Albert Einstein

• Unfortunately, I am no superman like Mussolini.
  • Mahatma Gandhi,

• Mussolini is a great executive, a true leader of men, and the great works he has accomplished are his genuine fortifications to a high place in history and in the hearts of his people.
  • Millicent Hearst, the wife of William Randolph Hearst, after a visit to Rome where she met Mussolini in the early 1930s.

• What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy.
  • Vladimir Lenin, addressed to a delegation of Italian socialists in Moscow after Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922. Quoted in "Third World Ideology and Western Reality" - Page 15 - by Carlos Rangel - 1986.

• Benito Mussolini is a Magnificent Beast. No apology is needed for an expression which the Duce himself would have found correct, and which fits like a glove — a boxing glove.
  • Salvador de Madariaga, published during 1968 in his work Americans

• Mussolini was the greatest man of our century, but he committed certain disasterous errors. I, who have the advantage of his precedent before me, shall follow in his footsteps but also avoid his errors.
  • Juan Perón. Quoted in "Argentina, 1943-1979: The National Revolution and Resistance" by Donald C. Hodges.

• Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say "But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time."
  • Ronald Reagan. Time in 1976. Reagan adviser Jude Wanniski has indicated that, in 1933, New Dealers as well as much of the world admired Mussolini’s success in avoiding the Great Depression.

• There seems to be no question that [Mussolini] is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt to US Ambassador to Italy Breckinridge Long,