Oriana Fallaci Quotes

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

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.

There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape.

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.

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.

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

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.

Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia,' a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Love isn’t putting chain on someone who wants to struggle and is ready to die for it, love is letting him die in the way he’s chosen.

Why do the people humiliate themselves by voting? I didn't vote because I have dignity. If I had closed my nose and voted for one of them, I would spit on my own face.

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.

Hearing him speak is so fun, reassuring I dare say. You can say all you like about Sihanouk: that he's an atrocious liar, a madman, a fraud, a swashbuckler, an international blot. You may think that, but you cannot deny how in this age in which the political arena seems to generate only dull, obtuse and boring characters with no imagination, he's a kind of miracle.

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.

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

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

Glory is a heavy burden, a murdering poison, and to bear it is an art. And to have that art is rare.

You cannot govern, you cannot administrate, with an ignoramus.

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

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.

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.

I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion.

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

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.

True power does not need arrogance, a long beard and a barking voice. True power strangles you with silk ribbons, charm and intelligence.

This Islam business kidnapped me.

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.

A lot of women ask themselves why they should bring a child into the world? So that it will be hungry, so that it will be cold, so that it will be betrayed and humiliated, so that it will be slaughtered by war or disease? They reject the hope that its hunger will be satisfied, its cold warmed, that loyalty and respect will accompany it through life, that it will be a devote a life to the effort to eliminate war and disease.

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'll impose upon you the same arrogance that was imposed on me, and on my mother, my grandmother, my grandmother's mother: all the way back to the first human born of another human being, whether he liked it or not. Probably, if he or she had been allowed to choose, he would have been frightened and answered: No, I don't want to be born. But no one asked their opinion, and so they were born and lived and died after giving birth to another human being who was not asked to choose, and that one did likewise, for millions of years, right down to us.

I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion.

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.

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

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

We do not understand these Americans who, like adolescents, always speak of sex, and who, like adolescents, all of a sudden have discovered that sex is good not only for procreating children.

To have realized your dream makes you feel lost.

With our progress we have destroyed our only weapon against tedium: that rare weakness we call imagination.

Khomeini was not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king - a real leader.

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.

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

[Indira Gandhi] looked tired that day, and all of a sudden I exclaimed, 'Deep down I don't envy you, and I shouldn't like to be in your place.' And she said, 'The problem is not in the problems I have, it's in the idiots around me. Democracy, you know...' I now wonder what she meant by that unfinished phrase.

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.