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Benito Mussolini

162 quotes

“...It was therefore not sufficient to create—as some have said superficially—an anti-altar to the altar of socialism. It was necessary to imagine a wholly new political conception, adequate to the living reality of the twentieth century, overcoming at the same time the ideological worship of liberalism, the limited horizons of various spent and exhausted democracies, and finally the violently Utopian spirit of Bolshevism.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: My Autobiography, New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1928. Reprinted in Benito Mussolini, My Rise And Fall, Volumes 1-2 Da Capo Press, 1998 (p. 68-9)
“Standing by me and helping my work as newspaper man were the Fascisti. They were composed of revolutionary spirits who believed in intervention. They were youths—the students of the universities, the socialist syndicalists—destroying faith in Karl Marx by their ideals.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: My Autobiography, New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1928. Reprinted in Benito Mussolini, My Rise And Fall, Volumes 1-2 Da Capo Press, 1998 (p. 40).
“Fascism was not the protector of any one class, but a supreme regulator of the relations between all citizens of a state.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: My Autobiography , New York: NY, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1928) p. 280
“The citizen in the Fascist State is no longer a selfish individual who has the anti-social right of rebelling against any law of the Collectivity.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: My Autobiography by Mussolini, New York: NY, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1928) p. 280
“The integral reclamation of our national territory is an enterprise the achievement of which would alone suffice to make the revolution of the Blackshirts glorious down the centuries.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to farmers and peasants in Rome (14 October 1928), quoted in Carl T. Schmidt, The Plough and the Sword: Labor, Land, and Property in Fascist Italy (1938), p. 73
“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to Chamber of Deputies (9 December 1928), quoted in Propaganda and Dictatorship (2007) by Marx Fritz Morstein, p. 48
“But you have not seen the last of me! Twelve years of my party life are, or ought to be, a sufficient guarantee of my faith in Socialism. Socialism is something which takes root in the heart... Do not think that in taking away my membership card you will be taking away my faith in the cause, or that you will prevent my still working for Socialism and revolution.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mussolini the ‘Socialist’” Speech in Milan (25 November 1914) Mussolini the “Socialist” p. 5
“The Socialists, and I am still one, although an exasperated one, never brought forward the question of irredentism, but left it to the Republicans. We are in favour of a national war. But there are also reasons, purely socialist in character, which spur us on towards intervention.”
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Recorded in: Mussolini the ‘Man of the War’” speech delivered at the Mazza, Parma (13 December 1914) p. 15
“The Revolutionary War. To say that we are causing a revolution in order to obtain war, is to say something which we cannot maintain. We do have not the strength. We find ourselves face to face with formidable coalitions, but the fasci of action have this object, to create that state of mind which will impose war upon the country.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Man of the War” speech in Malan (25 January 1915) p. 23
“The country is young, but its institutions are old; and when — If I may be allowed to quote once more from Karl Marx, the old Pangermanist — a conflict between new forces and old institutions begins to shape itself, that means that the new wine cannot any longer be kept in the old skins, or the inevitable will occur. The old forces of the political and social life of Italy will fall into fragments.”
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Recorded in: The Man of the War” speech in Malan (25 January 1915) p. 24
“The Socialist Intervention. We Socialists who were in favour of intervention advocated war, because we divined that it contained within it the seeds of revolution. It is not the first instance of revolutionary war. There were the Napoleonic wars, the war of 1870, the enterprises of Garibaldi, in which, had we lived in those days, we should have joined in the same spirit and same faith.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: To the Complete Vanquishing of the Huns” speech delivered at Sesto San Giovanni (1 December 1917) p. 27
“We are one with the United States. This is Internationalism, the real, true and lasting Internationalism, even if it has not got the formulas, dogmas and chrism of Socialism made official. It is in the trenches, where soldiers of different nationalities have crossed six thousand leagues of ocean to come and die in Europe.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Fatal Victory” speech at the Teatro Comunale, Bologna (24 May 1918) p. 46
“As Italy discovered America, so America and the rest of the New World must discover Italy, not only in the great towns, pulsating with life and humming with industry, but also in the country, where the humble labourers wait with quiet resignation for the dawn of a victorious and just peace to appear on the horizon.”
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Recorded in: In honour of the American People” speech (8 April 1918) p. 49
“No nation can become greater in which there are enormous masses condemned to the conditions of life of prehistoric humanity.”
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Recorded in: The League of Nations” speech in Milan (20 October 1918), p. 52
“I think that within five or six months’ time there will be quite a few Socialists who will recognize that I am the only Socialist that there has been in Italy for the last five years; and I am not being paradoxical, even if I add that the Socialist Party on the whole is detestable.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sacrifice, Work, and Production” Speech in Milan before the Fascio Milanese Combattimento (5 February 1920) p. 69
“How does it come about that we are said to be sold to the middle class, capitalism and the Government? But already our enemies dare no longer continue this accusation, so false and ridiculous it is.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fascismo’s Interests for the Working Classes” speech delivered at Prato della Marfisia in Ferrara (4 April 1921) p. 76
“I must tell you that the government over which I have the honour of presiding never has had, never can and never will have the intentions of following a so-called anti-labour policy. On the contrary, I want to praise the working classes, who do not put obstacles in the way of the Government, who work, and who have practically abolished strikes. They have redeemed themselves, because they no longer believe in the Asiatic Utopia which came from Russia; they believe in themselves, in their work; they believe in the possibility, which for me is a certainty, of a prosperous Italian nation.”
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Recorded in: Labor to Take the First Place in New Italy” delivered to a representative gathering of Fascisti dock-workers from Genoa in Rome (6 January 1923) p. 82
“I could understand a strike which had as its object the setting up of the Soviet in Italy, but I do not understand or admit this one, which is without aim, object or justification. It must and will fail, because the leaders themselves are in the cul de sac of this dilemma: either tragedy, because the State at this moment has its repressive machinery in full working order; or comedy, in the event of a revolt on the part of the workmen already outlined, and due to their being tired of serving a Socialist Party mostly composed of middle-class elements.”
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Recorded in: Outline of the Aims and Programme of Fascismo” speech delivered in Milan at the Liceo Beccaria (22 July 1919) p. 97
“I am a revolutionary and a reactionary. Really, life is always like this. I am afraid of the revolution which destroys and does not create. I fear going to extremes, the policy of madness, at the bottom of which may lie the destruction of this our fragile mechanical civilization, robbed of its solid moral basis, and the coming of a terrible race of dominators who would reintroduce discipline into the world and re-establish the necessary hierarchies with the cracking of whips and machine-guns.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Outline of the Aims and Programme of Fascismo” speech delivered in Milan at the Liceo Beccaria (22 July 1919) p. 98
“The Electoral Reform will pass. The scrutiny of lists and proportional representation will pass. That will determine, for obvious reasons, the great coalitions—the Socialist-Leninist, the Clerical-Popular, and, lastly ours, which might be called the ‘Alliance for the Constituent,’ the Republican Alliance or the group of the ‘interveners’ of the Left.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Outline of the Aims and Programme of Fascismo” speech delivered in Milan at the Liceo Beccaria (22 July 1919) p. 101
“We are syndicalists, because we think that by means of the mass it may be possible to determine an economic readjustment...”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fascismo and the Rights of Victory” speech delivered at Florence (9 October 1919) p. 106
“Our destiny cannot become universal unless it is transplanted to the pagan ground of Rome. By means of Paganism Rome found her form and found the means of upholding herself in the world.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Tasks of Fascismo” speech delivered at the Politeama Rossetti at Trieste (20 September 1920) p. 113
“Foolish and reactionary and Conservative contraband practices must not be carried on under the Fascista flag... We are the first to recognize that a State law should grant the eight-hour day, and that there should be social legislation corresponding to the exigencies of the new times.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How Fascismo was Created” speech (3 April 1921) delivered at the Teatro Comunale of Bologna, p. 139
“We play upon every cord of the lyre, from violence to religion, from art to politics. We are politicians and we are warriors. We are syndicalists and we also fight battles in the streets and the squares. That is Fascismo as it was conceived at Milan...”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Fascista Dawning of New Italy” speech (6 October 1922) delivered at Milan at the “Sciesa,” p. 168
“Our position is different as regards the Socialist Party. In the first place we are careful to make a distinction between party Socialism and the Socialism of Labour.”
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Recorded in: The Attitude of Fascismo towards Communism and Socialism,” speech (21 June 1921) delivered in the Italian parliament Chamber, p 197
“Social Democracy seems to have a very ambiguous position. First of all one wonders why it is called Social Democracy. A democracy is already necessarily social; we think, however that this Social Democracy is a kind of Trojan horse which holds within it an army against whom we shall always be at war.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Attitude of Fascismo towards the Popular Party. The Vatican and Social Democracy,” speech (21 June 1921) delivered in the Italian parliament Chamber, p. 203
“To make a revolution it is not necessary to play the great drama of the area. We have left many dead on the roads to Rome and naturally anybody who deludes himself is a fool. We have the power and we shall hold it. We shall defend it against anybody! The revolution lies in this firm determination to hold power!”
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Recorded in: The Election Reform Bill,” speech (16 July 1923) delivered at the Chamber of Deputies, p. 354
“I had the courage to transform the eight-hours day into a law of the State. Do not despise this victory; do not undervalue it. I have approved all the social and pacifist Conventions of Washington... No exceptional laws were pasted, and the regulation of the Press is not an exceptional law.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Election Reform Bill,” speech (16 July 1923) delivered at the Chamber of Deputies, p. 355
“Giovanni De Martino is the most important exponent of Italian art, the pride of Italy.”
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Recorded in: Quadriennale di Roma, 1931
“I am proud to be your friend, your brother, your leader. ... The Government looks on the peasants, in war and in peace, as the fundamental forces on which the country relies for its success. ... As between the city and the village, I am for the village. ... The time for a prevalently urban policy has passed. ... The people who abandon the land are condemned to decadence. ... I have willed that agriculture take first place in the Italian economy.”
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Recorded in: L'agricoltura e i rurali: Discorsi e scritti (1931), pp. 109–110, quoted in Carl T. Schmidt, The Plough and the Sword: Labor, Land, and Property in Fascist Italy (1938), p. 42
“The Fascist State has never tried to create its own God, as at one moment Robespierre and the wildest extremists of the Convention tried to do; nor does it vainly seek to obliterate religion from the hearts of men as does Bolshevism: Fascism respects the God of the ascetics, of the saints, of the heroes, and also God as seen and prayed to by the simple and primitive heart of the people.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Doctrine of Fascism, June 1932. Quoted in Charles Floyd Delzell, Mediterranean Fascism, 1919-45 Springer, 1971
“A unanimous, universally-accepted theory of Socialism did not exist after 1905, when the revisionist movement began in Germany under the leadership of Bernstein, which under pressure of the tendencies of the time, a Left Revolutionary movement also appeared, which though never getting further than talk in Italy, in Russian Socialistic circles laid the foundations of Bolshevism.”
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Recorded in: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, “Hogarth Press, London, (1933), p. 7
“When, in the now distant March of 1919, I summoned a meeting at Milan through the columns of the Popolo d'Italia of the surviving members of the Interventionist Party who had themselves been in action, and who had followed me since the creation of the Fascist Revolutionary Party (which took place in January of 1915).”
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Recorded in: As quoted in Mussolini’s “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism”, Jane Soames translator, Hogarth Press, London, authorized edition (1933) p. 7.
“Yet the Fascist State is unique, and an original creation. It is not reactionary, but revolutionary, in that it anticipates the solution of the universal political problems which elsewhere have to be settled in the political field by the rivalry of parties, the excessive power of the Parliamentary regime and the irresponsibility of political assemblies.”
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Recorded in: As quoted in “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism”, Jane Soames translator, Hogarth Press, London, authorized edition (1933) p. 23
“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 above all for others — those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after.”
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Recorded in: The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932)
“It was inevitable that I should become a Socialist ultra, a Blanquist, indeed a communist. I carried about a medallion with Marx’s head on it in my pocket. I think I regarded it as a sort of talisman… [Marx] had a profound critical intelligence and was in some sense even a prophet.”
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Recorded in: As quoted in Talks with Mussolini , Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933) p. 38. Interview between March 23 and April 4, 1932, at the Palazzo di Venezia in Rome
“I never felt that there was any conflict between my military duties and my Socialism. Why should not a good soldier be also a fighter in the class war?”
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Recorded in: As quoted in Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933), p. 41, interview took place between March 23 and April 4, 1932
“A revolutionist is born, not made.”
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Recorded in: Talks with Mussolini, interviewer Emil Ludwig, Boston: MA, Little, Brown and Company, 1933, p. 66. Interview took place between March 23 and April 4, 1932
“Race! It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today. Amusingly enough, not one of those who have proclaimed the "nobility" of the Teutonic race was himself a Teuton.”
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Recorded in: As quoted in Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933) pp. 69–70. Interview between March 23 and April 4, 1932, at the Palazzo di Venezia in Rome
“National pride has no need of the delirium of race. Anti-Semitism does not exist in Italy... Whenever things go awry in Germany, the Jews are blamed for it.”
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Recorded in: As quoted in Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933) pp. 70–71. Mussolini’s interview was in 1932.
“Here in Italy Socialism was a unifying factor. All Italian historians have recognized this. The Socialists of Italy were advocates of one idea and of one nation. From 1892, when they cut adrift from the anarchists at the Congress of Genoa, down till 1911, they battled for on behalf of a united Italy.”
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Recorded in: Talks with Mussolini, interviewer Emil Ludwig, Boston: MA, Little, Brown, and Company, 1933, pp. 82–83 Interview took place between March 23 and April 4, 1932
“As long as 1911, when I was still a member of the Socialist Party, I wrote that the Gordian knot of Trent could be cut only by the sword. At the same date I declared that war is usually the prelude to revolution. It was therefore easy for me, when the Great War broke out, to predict the Russian and the German revolutions.”
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Recorded in: As quoted in Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933), p. 84, Interview took place between March 23 and April 4, 1932
“The Fascist State directs and controls the entrepreneurs, whether it be in our fisheries or in our heavy industry in the Val d'Aosta. There the State actually owns the mines and carries on transport, for the railways are state property. So are many of the factories... We term it state intervention... If anything fails to work properly, the State intervenes. The capitalists will go on doing what they are told, down to the very end. They have no option and cannot put up any fight. Capital is not God; it is only a means to an end.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933), pp. 153–154, Interview took place between March 23 and April 4, 1932
“There is a great deal of Prussianism in German Socialism. My impression has been that that explains why German Socialists are so disciplined.”
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Recorded in: As quoted in Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933), p. 162, interview took place between March 23 and April 4, 1932
“I admire Lassalle. He was a man of first-class intelligence and endowed with far more imagination than Marx. That was why his vision of the days to come was far less catastrophic than that of Marx.”
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Recorded in: Talks with Mussolini, interviewer Emil Ludwig, Boston: MA, Little, Brown and Company, 1933, p. 201. Interview took place between March 23 and April 4, 1932
“Speeches made to the people are essential to the arousing of enthusiasm for a war.”
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Recorded in: As quoted in Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933). Mussolini’s interview was in 1932.
“I want to make my own life a masterpiece.”
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Recorded in: Talks with Mussolini (1932), quoting earlier remarks
“Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can direct human society. It denies that numbers can govern by means of periodical consultations: It asserts the unavoidable fruitful and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage.”
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Recorded in: The Doctrine of Fascism", June 1932. Quoted in Marco Piraino, Stefano Fiorito, Fascist identity : political project and doctrine of fascism. Lulu.com, 2009. (p. 107)
“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.”
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Recorded in: The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932), quoted in The New York Times (11 January 1935)
“If the 19th was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932)