Oriana Fallaci Quotes

I live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant.

The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.

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.

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 love soldiers. They are my kids, they are my children.

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

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

You cannot work and be at home with your child. But you want both.

I have reached the conclusion that those who have physical courage also have moral courage. Physical courage is a great test.

I'll parade with those who are alone like me. They exist. They are very few, but they exist. I'll find them.

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

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.

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

Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion.

If a man is a man and not a sheep in the flock, he has a survival instinct in him that leads him to fight even if he realizes he's fighting in vain, even if he knows he will lose..

America's a hard school, I know, but hard schools make excellent graduates.

I no longer have the energy to get really angry, like I used to.

Have you ever thought that war is a madhouse and that everyone in the war is a patient?

Wojtyla was a warrior, who did more to end the Soviet Union than even America.

America's vulnerability comes precisely from its strength, its wealth, its power and its modernity. It's the usual story of the dog chasing its own tail.

If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic Church, on the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches your 'right of thought and expression.' But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination.

Objectivity does not 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.

What's the point anyway - Of suffering, dying? It teaches us to live, boy. A man who does not struggle does not live, he survives.

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

Don't let yourself be regimented by dogma, by uniforms, by doctrines, don't let yourselves be fooled by those who command you, by those who promise, who frighten, by those who want to replace one master with another, don't be flock of sheep, for heaven's sake, don't hide under the umbrella of other people's guilt, think with your own brains, remember that each of you is somebody, a valuable individual, a responsible, his own maker, defend your being, the kernel of all freedom, freedom is a duty, a duty even more than right

Physical courage is a great test.

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

It must be terribly lonely to be a king instead of a man.

Laura Bush has the face of my mother when my mother was young. The face, the body, the voice. The first time I saw on TV Laura Bush, I got frozen because it was as if my mother was not dead. 'Oh, Mama,' I said, 'Mama.'

A civilization, a culture, cannot survive without passion, cannot be saved without passion.

My soldier weapon is the weapon of truth.

The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.

I don't hide. I never have. I stay at home because I like to stay at home, and at home I work.

I am angry at the Jews for many things ... If you want to take the example of America, how they hold the power, the economical power in so many ways, and the press and the other kind of stuff ... I never realized how it happened and they came to control the media to that point. Why?

I don't want to hear about my death.

How can a man understand a woman who is expecting a child. He can't get pregnant. Is that an advantage or a limitation? Up until yesterday it seemed to me an advantage, even a privilege. Today it seems to me a limitation, even an impoverishment. There's something glorious about enclosing another life in your own body, in knowing yourself to be two instead of one. At moments you're even invaded by a sense of triumph, and in the serenity accompanying that triumph nothing bothers you: neither the physical pain you'll have to face, nor the work you'll have to sacrifice, nor the freedom you'll have to give up.

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 ...

You belong neither to God nor the state nor me. You belong to yourself and no one else.

The most humiliating thing a woman can be is a coquette.

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

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

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.

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.

We are an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century.

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 must admit that I am not generous with weak people. It's not in my nature or in my personality. My parents were not generous with weak people, see?

War is something Arafat sends others to do for him. That is, the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent caused the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Clinton's mediation.

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.

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

You wear yourself out in the pursuit of wealth or love or freedom, you do everything to gain some right, and once it's gained you take no pleasure in it.

But to deny fate is arrogance, to declare that we are the sole shapers of our existence is madness;if you deny fate life becomes the series of missed opportunities, a regret for what never was and could have been, a remorse of what was not done and could have been done, and the present is wasted, twisted into another missed oppurtunity.

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.

Wake up, folks, wake up! As intimidated as you are by the fear of going against the stream and looking racist (a grossly erroneous word, by the way, because the problem has nothing to do with a race: it has to do with a religion) you don't understand or don't want to understand that a Reverse Crusade is on the march. As blinded as you are by the myopia and the stupidity of the Politically Correct, you don't realize or don't want to realize that a war of religion is being carried out. A war they call Jihad. … A war which is conducted to destroy our civilization, our ways of living and dying, or praying or not praying, of eating and drinking and dressing and studying and enjoying Life.

No matter what system you live under, there is no escaping the law that it's always the strongest, the cruellest, the least generous who win.

To be good or bad doesn't count: life out in this world doesn't depend on that. It depends on a relation of forces based on violence. And survival is violence. You'll wear leather shoes because someone has killed a cow and skinned it to make leather.

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!

Listen: if I am a painter and I do your portrait, have I or haven't I the right to paint you as I want?

I cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics.

Equality ... like freedom, exists only where you are now. Only as an egg in the womb are we all equal.

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.

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.

the world changes and remains the same.

I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple!

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

I don't even know if I will be around next year. My cancers are so bad that I think I've arrived at the end of the road. What a pity. I would like to live not only because I love life so much, but because I'd like to see the result of the trial. I do think I will be found guilty.

I know ours is a world made by men for men, their dictatorship is so ancient it even extends to language.

To have realized your dream makes you feel lost.

There are three points of view to everything - mine, yours, and the truth.

It is the mainspring of life, courage. And courage has many faces.

I find it shameful that in nearly all the universities of Europe, Palestinian students sponsor and nurture anti-Semitism.

I defend Israel's right to exist, to defend themselves, to not let themselves be exterminated a second time.

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.

In the legends that males have invented to explain life, the first human creature is a man named Adam. Eve arrives later, to give him pleasure and cause trouble. In the paintings that adorn churches, God is an old man with a beard, never an old woman with white hair. And all the heroes are males: from Prometheus who discovered fire to Icarus who tried to fly, on down to Jesus whom they call the Son of God and of the Holy Spirit, almost as though the woman giving birth to him were an incubator or a wetnurse.