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Benito Mussolini

dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1945

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (29 July 1883 – 28 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who founded and led the National Fascist Party. He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 1943, and "Duce" of Italian Fascism from the establishment of the Italian Fasces of Combat in 1919 until his execution in 1945 by Italian partisans. As dictator of Italy and principal founder of fascism, Mussolini inspired and supported the international spread of fascist movements during the inter-war period.

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.

Quotes

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1900s

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For us the national flag is a rag to be planted on a dunghill. There are only two fatherlands in the world: that of the exploited and that of the exploiters.
 
Everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.
 
Blood alone moves the wheels of history.
 
Speeches made to the people are essential to the arousing of enthusiasm for a war.
 
Better to live a day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.
 
History teaches us that empires are conquered by arms but are held by prestige. And for prestige it is necessary to have a clear, severe racial consciousness, that establishes not only the differences, but also very clear superiorities.
  • Religion is a species of mental disease. It has always had a pathological reaction on mankind.
    • As quoted by Mussolini in 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt by James A. Haught (1966) p. 256. From a speech he made in Lausanne, July 1904.
  • Science is now in the process of destroying religious dogma. The dogma of the divine creation is recognized as absurd.
    • As quoted by Mussolini in 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt by James A. Haught (1966) p. 256. Originally came from Mussolini’s essay l'Homme et la Divinité, 1904.
  • Marx was the greatest of all theorists of socialism.
    • As quoted in Mussolini: A Biography by Denis Mack Smith (1983) p. 7. Original source: Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini (OO) 1/102-3 (14 Mar. 1908), 135, 142.
  • Militarism! Here is the monstrous leech that is incessantly sucking the blood of the people and its best energy! Here is the target for our attacks! We must put an end to barbarism, proclaim that the army is now a highly organized school of crime and that it exists solely to protect bourgeois capital and profits. We must not be deterred from proclaiming ourselves international socialists. We recognize no borders and no flags, we hate all steel, every institution that exist to kill men, waste energy, strangle the advance of the workers.
    • Mussolini's article, (April 11, 1909), quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution, Jacob Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 487,

God Does Not Exist (1904)

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Benito Mussolini, God Does Not Exist. Published in 1904; Lausanne, Switzerland. Translated by George Seldes, 1935.
  • The struggle against the religious absurdity is more than ever a necessity today.
  • When we claim that "God does not exist," we mean to deny by this declaration the personal God of theology, the God worshiped in various ways and divers modes by believers the world over, that God who from nothing created the universe, from chaos matter, that God of absurd attributes who is an affront to human reason.
  • With each new discovery of chemistry, physics, biology, the anthropological sciences, of the practical application of sound principles, dogma collapses. It is a part of that old edifice of religion which crumbles and falls in ruins.
  • How can the idea of a creator be reconciled with the existence of dwarfed and atrophied organs, with anomalies and monstrosities, with the existence of pain, perpetual and universal, with the struggle and the inequalities among human beings?
  • Science is now in the process of destroying religious dogma. The dogma of the divine creation is recognized as absurd.
  • The Bible and morals called Christian are two cadavers.
  • Religious morality shows the original stigmata of authoritarianism precisely because it pretends to be the revelation of divine authority.
  • Religion is a psychic disease of the brain.
  • The history of many saints, beatified by the church, is repugnant. It shows nothing more than a profound aberration of the human spirit in search of ultra-terrestrial chimeras.
  • If today the Middle Ages are retiring into the thick shadows of convents, it is due to triumphant skepticism; and if the epidemic disease of religion no longer appears with the terrible intensity of former times, it is due to the diminution of the political power of the Church.
  • The faculty by which man is differentiated from the lower animals is his reasoning power. But the devout believer renounces reason, refuses to explain the things which surround him, the innumerable natural phenomena, because his religious faith is enough for him. The brain loses the habit of thinking; and this religious sottishness hurls mankind back into animalism.
  • "Religious man" is an abnormality and "religion" is the certain cause of epidemic diseases of the mind which require the care of alienists.

1910s

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  • For us the national flag is a rag to be planted on a dunghill. There are only two fatherlands in the world: that of the exploited and that of the exploiters.
    • La Lotta di Classe (1910), while a socialist, paraphrasing French socialist Gustave Hervé, quoted in Mussolini in the Making (1938) by Gaudens Megaro
    • Variant translation: The national flag is a rag that should be placed in a dunghill.
      • As quoted in Aspects of European History, 1789-1980 (1988) by Stephen J. Lee, p. 191
  • The rapacious property-owning American bourgeoisie admits no limits, possesses no scruples and does not share the fears and the cowardice of our bourgeoisie. [They are] violent, absolute criminal. When they feel the need, they simply stain their hands with proletarian blood. They lack any human sense. They are only interested in exploitation.
    • As quoted in Mussolini, R.J.B. Bosworth, London and New York, Bloomsbury Academic (2010) p. 70, original source: B. Mussolini, Opera Omnia (ed. E and D. Susmel), Vol. IV, p. 16 (written in 1911)
  • Socialism has to remain a terrifying and a majestic thing. If we follow this line, we shall be able to face our enemies.
    • As quoted in Il Duce: The Life and Work of Benito Mussolini, L. Kemechey, New York: NY, Richard R. Smith (1930) p. 54. Written just before taking editorship of the Italian Socialist Party newspaper Avanti in 1912.
  • The law of socialism is that of the desert: a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. Socialism is a rude and bitter truth, which was born in the conflict of opposing forces and in violence. Socialism is war, and woe to those who are cowardly in war. They will be defeated.
    • As quoted in Il Duce: The Life and Work of Benito Mussolini, L. Kemechey, New York: NY, Richard R. Smith (1930) p. 56. Written just before taking editorship of the Italian Socialist Party newspaper Avanti in 1912.
  • What does it matter to the proletarian to understand socialism as one understands a theorem? And is socialism perhaps reducible to a theorem? We want to believe in it; we must believe in it. Humanity needs a credo. It is faith that moves mountains because it gives the illusion that mountains move. Illusion is perhaps the only reality of life.
    • Gaudens Megaro, Mussolini in the Making, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, (1938) p. 321, a statement made by Mussolini in 1912
  • The root of our psychological weakness was this: We socialists have never examined the problems of nations. The International was never concerned with it. The International is dead, paralyzed by events. Ten million proletarians are today on the battlefield.
    • As quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution, J.L. Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 492. Original source: Mussolini, Opera Omnia VI, p. 427, 1914
  • You cannot get rid of me because I am and always will be a socialist. You hate me because you still love me.
    • Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini: A Biography (1983) p. 8. As quoted by Mussolini after he was expelled from the Italian Socialist Party in 1914.
  • Do not believe, even for a moment, that by stripping me of my membership card you do the same to my Socialist beliefs, nor that you would restrain me of continuing to work in favor of Socialism and of the Revolution.
    • Speech at the Italian Socialist Party’s meeting in Milan at the People’s Theatre on Nov. 25, 1914. Quote in Revolutionary Fascism by Erik Norling, Lisbon, Finis Mundi Press (2011) p. 88.
  • The new society cannot get out of the involucrum of the old society, except by smashing it to pieces; two conceptions, two classes, two worlds will contend for primacy, and only force will compel the weaker to disappear. For this reason, we socialists of the first school, Marxist and catastrophic, if you wish, explain to ourselves the partial violence of to-day and the violence of to-morrow… Do not call us prophets of massacre if we present the possibility that the socialist revolution will have insurrectional episodes. It is puerile to think that such a radical displacement of interests, such a profound transformation of habits can be accomplished without violent conflicts.
    • Gaudens Megaro, Mussolini in the Making, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, (1938) p. 128
  • The dangerous persons for the socialist movement are not the intellectuals, but those who are not convinced of socialism. And all those who call themselves socialists without knowing why they are socialists.
    • Gaudens Megaro, Mussolini in the Making, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, (1938) p. 130
  • We declare war against socialism, not because it is socialism, but because it has opposed nationalism.... We intend to be an active minority, attract the proletariat away from the official Socialist party. But if the middle class thinks that we are going to be their lightning rods, they are mistaken.
    • Mussolini’s speech in Milan (March 23, 1919), quoted in Stanislao G. Pugliese, Fascism, Anti-fascism, and the Resistance in Italy: 1919 to the Present, Oxford, England, UK, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., (2004) p. 43
  • Although we can discuss the question of what socialism is, what is its program and what are its tactics, one thing is obvious: the official Italian Socialist Party has been reactionary and absolutely conservative.
    • Mussolini's March 23, 1919 speech to announce the first Fasci di Combattimento (League of Combat). Published in Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Resistance in Italy: 1919 to the Present, Stanislao G. Pugliese, Lanham: Maryland, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (2004) p. 43
  • This is what we propose now to the Treasury: either the property owners expropriate themselves, or we summon the masses of war veterans to march against these obstacles and overthrow them.
  • We want an extraordinary heavy taxation, with a progressive character, on capital, that will represent an authentic partial expropriation of all wealth; seizures of all assets of religious congregations and suppression of all the ecclesiastic Episcopal revenues, in what constitutes an enormous deficit of the nation and a privilege for a minority; revisions of all contracts made by the war ministers and seizure of 85% of all war profits.
    • From Mussolini's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Fasci), Il Popolo d'Italia newspaper, June 6, 1919. Speech published in Revolutionary Fascism, by Erik Norling, Lisbon, Finis Mundi Press (2011) p. 92.

1920s

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  • 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.
    • Popolo d'Italia (14 July 1920) "The Artificer and the Material," quoted in Mussolini in the Making (1938) by Gaudens Megaro, p. 326
  • When dealing with such a race as Slavic - inferior and barbarian - we must not pursue the carrot, but the stick policy [...] We should not be afraid of new victims [...] The Italian border should run across the Brenner Pass, Monte Nevoso and the Dinaric Alps: I would say we can easily sacrifice 500,000 barbaric Slavs for 50,000 Italians.
    • Speech held in Pula, 20 September 1920[1][2]
  • 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.
    • Popolo d'Italia (Feb. 1, 1921), quoted in The Menace of Fascism, John Strachey (1933) p. 65
  • We assert—and on the basis of the most recent socialist literature that you cannot deny—that the real history of capitalism is only now beginning, because capitalism is not just a system of oppression; it also represents a choice of value,…
    • As quoted in Mediterranean Fascism 1919-1945, edit., Charles F. Delzell, The MacMillian Press (1970) p. 23. Speech given on June 21, 1921 in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies.
  • I know the Communists. I know them because some of them are my children…
    • Speech quoted in Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism by Ernst Nolte, Henry Holt & Company, Inc. (1966) p. 154. Speech given on June 21, 1921 in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies.
      • Conosco i comunisti. Li conosco perchè parte di loro sono i miei figli... intendiamoci... spirituali.
  • I shall defend this pact with all my strength, and if Fascism does not follow me in collaboration with the Socialists, at least no one can force me to follow Fascism.
    • As quoted in Italy: A Modern History, Denis Mack Smith, University of Michigan Press (1959) p. 352, Pact of Pacification, 1921
  • [Provincial Fascism is] “no longer liberation, but tyranny; no longer protector of the nation, but defense of private interests and of the dullest, deafest, most miserable cast that exists in Italy."
    • Quoted in The Making of Fascism: Class, State, and Counter-Revolution, Italy 1919-1922, Dahlia S. Elazar, Westport, CT, Praeger, 2001, p. 141 and in Fascism in Ferrara, 1915-1925, Paul Corner, New York, NY, London: UK, Oxford Univ. Press, 1975, p. 193, n.5, Pact of Pacification, 1921
  • To-morrow, Fascists and communists, both persecuted by the police, may arrive at an agreement, sinking their differences until the time comes to share the spoils. I realise that though there are no political affinities between us, there are plenty of intellectual affinities. Like them, we believe in the necessity for a centralised and unitary state, imposing an iron discipline on everyone, but with the difference that they reach this conclusion through the idea of class, we through the idea of the nation.
    • As quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution, Jacob Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 494, Mussolini's declaration near the end of 1921
  • Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. 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 himself 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
  • Christ is dead and his teachings moribund.
    • As quoted in Twentieth Century Journey: The Start 1904-1930, William L. Shirer, Little, Brown & Company, (1976) p. 402 (proclaimed in 1922)
  • 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.
    • Speech at Udine (September 20, 1922) "The Question of Regime. The Monarchy and Fascism," quoted in A History of Civilization (1955) by Crane Brinton, John B. Christopher, and Robert Lee Wolff, p. 520
  • The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements. ...They were elements of disorder and subversion. On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results.
    • Speech before the Italian Senate (8 June 1923). Mussolini as Revealed in His Political Speeches (London & Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1923), pp. 308-309.
  • Liberty is a duty, not a right.
    • Speech on the 5th anniversary of the Combat Leagues (24 March 1924) quoted in Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (1991) by Tim Redman, p. 114.
  • God does not exist—religion in science is an absurdity, in practice an immorality and in men a disease.
    • “Religion: Benito a Christian?” Time magazine (August 25, 1924)
  • State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.
    • Quoted from “The Labor Charter: The Corporate State and its Organization”, promulgated by Mussolini's Grand Council of Fascism, Article 9, (April 21, 1927) Copy found in Mediterranean Fascism 1919-1945, Charles F. Delzell, The MacMillan Press, (1971) p. 122. Also in Benito Mussolini’s “Doctrine of Fascism”, published as “Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions” (1935), Rome: Ardita Publishers, p.135-136.
  • Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter's prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes' excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.
    • As quoted from Mussolini's review of Keynes' new book in Universal Aspects of Fascism, James Strachey Barnes, Williams and Norgate, London: UK, (1928) pp. 113-114
  • 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
  • ...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.
    • 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.
    • 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).
  • My labor had not been easy nor light; our Masonry had spun a most intricate net of anti-religious activity; it dominated the currents of thought; it exercised its influence over publishing houses, over teaching, over the administration of justice and even over certain dominant sections of the armed forces. To give an idea of how far things had gone, this significant example is sufficient. When, in parliament, I delivered my first speech of November 16, 1922, after the Fascist revolution, I concluded by invoking the assistance of God in my difficult task. Well, this sentence of mine seemed to be out of place! In the Italian parliament, a field of action for Italian Masonry, the name of God had been banned for a long time. Not even the Popular party — the so-called Catholic party — had ever thought of speaking of God. In Italy, a political man did not even turn his thoughts to the Divinity. And, even if he had ever thought of doing so, political opportunism and cowardice would have deterred him, particularly in a legislative assembly. It remained for me to make this bold innovation! And in an intense period of revolution! What is the truth! It is that a faith openly professed is a sign of strength. I have seen the religious spirit bloom again; churches once more are crowded, the ministers of God are themselves invested with new respect. Fascism has done and is doing its duty.
    • My Autobiography (1928)
  • Fascism was not the protector of any one class, but a supreme regulator of the relations between all citizens of a state.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • Speech to Chamber of Deputies (9 December 1928), quoted in Propaganda and Dictatorship (2007) by Marx Fritz Morstein, p. 48

Mussolini as Revealed in his Political Speeches (November 1914—August 1923) (1923)

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[Selected, translated and edited by Barone Bernardo Quaranta di San Severino, London & Toronto, J.M. Dent & Sons, LTD., New York, E.P. Dutton & Co.
  • 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.
    • “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.
    • “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.
    • “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.
    • “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.
    • “To the Complete Vanquishing of the Huns” speech delivered at Sesto San Giovanni (1 December 1917) p. 27
  • Karl Marx, too, was a jingoist. In 1855 he wrote that Germany would have been obligated to declare war against Russia; and in 1870 he said of the French: ‘They must be defeated! They will never be sufficiently beaten.’ And when in 1871 the Socialists of France, with Latin ingenuousness, after declaring the Republic, sent a passionate appeal to the Germans for peace, Karl Marx said: ‘These imbeciles of Frenchmen claim that for their rag of a republic we should renounce all the advantages of this war.’ One does not deny one’s country. It is possible to remain a Socialist and be in favour of certain wars.
    • “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.
    • “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.
    • “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.
  • All other parties and associations argue on a basis of dogma and from the standpoint of definite preconceptions and infallible ideals. We, being an anti-party, have no preconceptions. We are not like the Socialists, who always think that the working masses are in the right, and we are not like the Conservatives, who think that they are always in the wrong… First, we have kept in mind the general interests of the nation, particularly as regards the recent strikes. Secondly, we have considered the subject of production, because if we kill production, if to-day we render sterile the fount of economic activity, to-morrow there will be universal poverty.
    • “Sacrifice, Work, and Production” Speech in Milan before the Fascio Milanese Combattimento (5 February 1920) p. 67
  • 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.
    • “Sacrifice, Work, and Production” Speech in Milan before the Fascio Milanese Combattimento (5 February 1920) p. 69
  • We do not intend to oppose the movement of the working classes, only to unmask the work of mystification which is carried on by a horde of middle-class, lower-middle-class and pseudo-middle-class men, who think that they have become the saviours of humanity by the mere fact of being possessed of a card of membership. ‘We are not against the proletariat, but against the Socialist Party in as far as it continues to be anti-Italian.’ The Socialist Party continued, after the victory, to abuse the war, to fight against those who had been in favour of intervention, threatening reprisals and excommunication.
    • “We Are Not Against Labour, But Against the Socialist Party, in as far as it Remains Anti-Italian” speech at Milan (24 May 1920), p. 73
  • 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.
    • “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.
    • “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.
    • “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.
    • “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.
    • “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…
    • “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 Panganism Rome found her form and found the means of upholding herself in the world.
    • “The Tasks of Fascismo” speech delivered at the Politeama Rossetti at Trieste (20 September 1920) p. 113
  • But after all, my dear friends, does Bolshevism exist in Russia? It does not any longer. There are no longer councils of the factories, but dictators of the factories; no longer eight hours of work, but twelve; no longer equal salaries, but thirty-five different categories, not according to need, but according to merit. There is not in Russia even that liberty which there is in Italy. Is there a dictatorship of the proletariat? No! Is there a dictatorship of the Socialists? No! There is a dictatorship of a few intelligent men, not workmen, who belong to a section of the Socialist Party, and their dictatorship is opposed by all other sections. This dictatorship of a few men is what is called Bolshevism. Now we do not want this in Italy.
    • “The Tasks of Fascismo” speech delivered at the Politeama Rossetti at Trieste (20 September 1920) pp. 116-117
  • 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.
    • “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…
    • “The Fascista Dawning of New Italy” speech (6 October 1922) delivered at Milan at the “Sciesa,” p. 168
  • I recognize the fact that the sacrifices made by the Italian Jews during the war were considerable and generous, but now it is a question of examining certain political positions and of indicating what line the government might eventually adopt… This is in the interest of the Jews, who, having fled from the pogroms of Ukraine and Poland, must not meet Arab pogroms in Palestine; moreover, it is advisable that the Western nations should refrain from creating a painful legal position for the Jews, since to-morrow those same Jews, becoming citizen-subjects of those States, might immediately form foreign colonies within them.
    • “Italy, Sionism, and the English Mandate in Palestine” speech (21 June 1921) delivered in the Italian parliament Chamber, p. 195
  • 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.
    • "The Attitude of Fascismo towards Communism and Socialism,” speech (21 June 1921) delivered in the Italian parliament Chamber, p 197
  • Not only this, but we affirm, and on the strength of recent Socialist literature, which you ought not to repudiate, that the real history of capitalism is beginning now, because capitalism is not only a system of oppression, but a selection of that which is of most worth, a co-ordination of hierarchies, a more strongly developed sense of individual responsibility. So true is this that Lenin, after having instituted the building councils, abolished them and put in dictators; so true is it that, after having nationalised commerce, he reintroduced the regime of liberty; and as you who have been in Russia well know, after having suppressed—even physically—the bourgeoisie, to-day he summons it back, because without capitalism and its technical system of production, Russia could never rise again.
    • “The Attitude of Fascismo towards Communism and Socialism,” speech (21 June 1921) delivered in the Italian parliament Chamber, p. 199
  • 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.
    • “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!
    • “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.
    • “The Election Reform Bill,” speech (16 July 1923) delivered at the Chamber of Deputies, p. 355

1930s

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  • Giovanni De Martino is the most important exponent of Italian art, the pride of Italy.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, “Hogarth Press, London, (1933), p. 7 [1]
  • 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).
    • 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.
    • As quoted in “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism”, Jane Soames translator, Hogarth Press, London, authorized edition (1933) p. 23
  • 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.
    • "The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932), credited to Mussolini but ghostwritten by Giovanni Gentile; quoted in Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and the Resistance in Italy : 1919 to the Present (2004) by Stanislao G. Pugliese, p. 89
  • 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.
    • "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.
    • 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 [2]
  • 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?
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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 [3]
  • 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.
    • 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.”
    • 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.
    • 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
  • Socialism is not Arcadian and peaceful. We do not believe in the sacredness of human life.
    • As quoted in Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933), p. 151, 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • As quoted in Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933). Mussolini’s interview was in 1932.
  • 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.
    • "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)
  • For Fascism, the growth of Empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; any renunciation is a sign of decay and of death. Fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude. But Empire demands discipline, the coordination of all forces and a deeply felt sense of duty and sacrifice.
    • "The Doctrine of Fascism", June 1932. Quoted in Paul O'Brien, Mussolini in the First World War: The Journalist, the Soldier, the Fascist. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. Also in Peter N. Stearns, World History in Documents: A Comparative Reader. NYU Press, 2008.
  • 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.
    • "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.
    • "The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932)
  • I have no love for the Jews, but they have great influence everywhere. It is better to leave them alone. Hitler's antisemitism has already brought him more enemies than is necessary.
    • Mussolini in conversation with the Austrian ambassador to Italy in 1932 over the then-predicted rise of Adolf Hitler to power in Germany. As quoted in Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, Albert S. Lindemann, Cambridge University Press (1997), p. 466
  • Inside every anarchist is a failed dictator.
    • Quote from The Golden Book Magazine Vol. 16 (1932), p. 206 translated from what Mussolini said to Emil Ludwig (Colloqui con Mussolini, 1932)
  • The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people.
    • Mussolini’s book review in Popolo d’Italia (July 7, 1933) Cited from Marco Sedda, “Il New Deal nella pubblicisticà politica italiana dal 1933 al 1938,” Il politico, vol. 64 (1999), p. 250
  • The question is often asked in America and in Europe just how much ‘Fascism’ the American President’s program contains. Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices, having recognized that the welfare of the economy is identical with the welfare of the people. Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism. More than that cannot be said at the moment.
    • Mussolini’s book review in Popolo d’Italia (July 7, 1933) Cited from Marco Sedda, “Il New Deal nella pubblicisticà politica italiana dal 1933 al 1938,” Il politico, vol. 64 (1999), p. 250
  • Comrade Tassinari was right in stating that for a revolution to be great, for it to make a deep impression on the life of the people and on history, it must be a social revolution.
    • Speech to the National Corporative Council (November 14, 1933), in A Primer of Italian Fascism, edited/translated by Jeffrey T. Schnapp (2000) p.163.
  • To-day we can affirm that the capitalistic method of production is out of date. So is the doctrine of laissez-faire, the theoretical basis of capitalism… To-day we are taking a new and decisive step in the path of revolution. A revolution, in order to be great, must be a social revolution.
    • Speech on November 14, 1933 as quoted in Under the Axe of Fascism, Gaetano Salvemini, London, UK, Victor Gollancz Ltd. (1936) p. 131
  • Italy is not a capitalist country according to the meaning now conventionally assigned to that term.
    • Address to the National Corporative Council (November 14, 1933), in A Primer of Italian Fascism, edited/translated by Jeffrey T. Schnapp (2000) p 160
  • At a given moment the worker, the tiller of the soil, must be able to say to himself and to his family: "If I am really better off today it is due to the institutions that the Fascist Revolution has created."
    • Speech to the National Corporative Council (14 November 1933), quoted in Carl T. Schmidt, The Plough and the Sword: Labor, Land, and Property in Fascist Italy (1938), p. 105
  • Three-fourths of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state. And if I dare to introduce to Italy state capitalism or state socialism, which is the reverse side of the medal, I will have the necessary subjective and objective conditions to do it.
    • The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification, by Gianni Toniolo, editor, Oxford University Press (2013) p. 59. Mussolini’s speech to the Chamber of Deputies on May 26, 1934
  • 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 who 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 statement (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
    • A similar statement appears in "Forza e Consenso" Gerarchia magazine (March 1923), excerpted in Cos'è il fascismo (1983)
  • The order of the day is this: Within a few decades all peasants and farm workers must possess large, healthful houses, in which the rural generations can live through the centuries, in which the race will find a secure foundation. Only thus is it possible to combat the poisons of urbanism, only thus is it possible to bring back to the villages and fields the deluded peasants who have followed the urban mirage of money wages and easy diversions.
    • Istituto Centrale di Statistica del Regno D'Italia, Indagine sulle case rurali in Italia (1934), p. 7, quoted in Carl T. Schmidt, The Plough and the Sword: Labor, Land, and Property in Fascist Italy (1938), p. 168
  • I am not a collector of deserts!
    • Remark to Pierre Laval (Jan. 5, 1935) on a proposed Ethiopian border, quoted in Duce!: A Biography of Benito Mussolini (1971) by Richard Collier, p. 125
  • It is no longer economy aiming at individual profit, but economy concerned with collective interest.
    • Mussolini, Four Speeches on the Corporate State, Laboremus, Roma, 1935, p. 38
  • Fascism establishes the real equality of individuals before the nation… the object of the regime in the economic field is to ensure higher social justice for the whole of the Italian people… What does social justice mean? It means work guaranteed, fair wages, decent homes, it means the possibility of continuous evolution and improvement. Nor is this enough. It means that the workers must enter more and more intimately into the productive process and share its necessary discipline… As the past century was the century of capitalist power, the twentieth century is the century of power and glory of labour.
    • Four Speeches on the Corporate State, Rome, (1935) pp. 39-40. Speech delivered to the workers in Milan. Eric Jabbari, Pierre Laroque and the Welfare State in Postwar France, Oxford University Press, (2012) p. 46
  • Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State . . . . It is opposed to classical Liberalism . . . . Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual.
    • "The Doctrine of Fascism" Firenze: Vallecchi Editore (1935 version), p. 13
  • Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.
    • “The Doctrine of Fascism” (1935 version), Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, p. 15
  • Silence is the only answer you should give to the fools. Where ignorance speaks, intelligence should not give advices.
    • The Lazio Speeches (1936), as quoted in The Book of Italian Wisdom by Antonio Santi, Citadel Press, (2003) p. 87.
  • We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.
    • The Lazio Speeches (1936), as quoted in The Book of Italian Wisdom by Antonio Santi, Citadel Press, 2003. p. 88.
  • I declare that henceforth capital and labor shall have equal rights and duties as brothers in the fascist family.
  • 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."
    • Remark to Galeazzo Ciano (December 19, 1937) quoted in The Book of Italian Wisdom (2003) by Antonio Santi, p. 50
  • With regard to domestic policy, the current burning issue is the racial question. Also in this field we will adopt the necessary solutions. Those who believe that we have obediently imitated anyone, or worse, acted on suggestions, are poor fools toward whom we do not know if we should direct our contempt or our pity. The racial problem did not suddenly burst out of nowhere, as those who are accustomed to brusque awakenings think — since they are used to long armchair naps. It is in relation to imperial conquest; because history teaches us that empires are conquered by arms but are held by prestige. And for prestige it is necessary to have a clear, severe racial consciousness, that establishes not only the differences, but also very clear superiorities.
    • Speech held in Trieste (September 18, 1938)[3]
  • World Jewry has been, for sixteen years, despite our policy, an irreconcilable enemy of Fascism. In Italy our policy has led, in the Semitic elements, to what can today be called a true rush to board the ship.
    • Speech held in Trieste (September 18, 1938)[3]
  • No one knows better than I with forty years' political experience that policy--particularly a revolutionary policy--has its tactical requirements. I recognised the Soviets in 1924. In 1934, I signed with them a treaty of commerce and friendship. I, therefore, understood that, especially as Ribbentrop's forecast about the non-intervention of Britain and France has not come off, you are obliged to avoid the second front [with Russia]. You have had to pay for this in that Russia has, without striking a blow, been the great profiteer of the war in Poland and the Baltic. But I, who was born a revolutionary and have not modified my revolutionary mentality, tell you that you cannot permanently sacrifice the principles of your revolution to the tactical requirements of a given moment... I have also the definite duty to add that a further step in the relations with Moscow would have catastrophic repercussions in Italy, where the unanimity of anti-Bolshevik feeling is absolute, granite-hard, and unbreakable. Permit me to think that this will not happen. The solution of your Lebensraum is in Russia, and nowhere else... The day when we shall have demolished Bolshevism we shall have kept faith with both our revolutions. Then it will be the turn of the great democracies, who will not be able to survive the cancer which gnaws them...
  • These men are not made of the same stuff as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers who created the empire. These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose their empire.
    • Remarks to Count Ciano (11 January 1939) after meeting Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, quoted in Malcolm Muggeridge (ed.), Ciano's Diary, 1939–1943 (1947), pp. 9–10
  • The shout of your legitimate exultation merges with the shout rising from all the cities of Spain now wholly free from the Reds’ infamy, and with the shout of the anti-Bolsheviks from all over the world. The bright victory of Barcelona is another chapter in the history of the new Europe we are creating. Franco’s magnificent troops and our intrepid legionnaires did not defeat only Negrín’s government. Many others among our enemies are biting the dust right now. The Reds’ watchword was ‘No pasarán’, but we passed and, I am telling you, we will pass.
    • January 26, 1939[4]
  • War is to man what motherhood is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.
    • Speech to the Chamber of Deputies (28 April 1939), quoted in The Military Quotation Book (2002) by James Charlton, p. 2

1940s

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  • 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.
    • Remark to Galeazzo Ciano (11 April 1940), quoted in Famous Lines : A Columbia Dictionary of Familiar Quotations (1997) by Robert Andrews. p. 330
  • The watchword is only one, categorical and challenging for everyone. It already flies across and lights the hearts from the Alps to the Indian Ocean: Winning! And we will win, in order to finally give a long period of peace with justice to Italy, to Europe, to the world. **From the declaration of war's announce, 10 June 1940
  • We go to battle against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the west… This gigantic struggle is nothing other than a phase in the logical development of our revolution; it is the struggle of peoples that are poor but rich in workers against the exploiters who hold on ferociously to the monopoly off all the riches and all the gold of the earth…
    • “Declaration of War on France and England,” Mussolini Speech on June 10, 1940
  • When the war is over, in the world's social revolution that will be followed by a more equitable distribution of the earth's riches, due account must be kept of the sacrifices and of the discipline maintained by the Italian workers. The Fascist revolution will make another decisive step to shorten social distances.
    • Mussolini’s speech in Rome, Italy, February 23, 1941. Published in the New York Times, February 24, 1941.
  • War is the normal state of the people.
    • "Duce (1922-42)" in Time magazine (August 2, 1943)
  • Better to live a day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.
    • Attributed in "Duce (1922-42)" in Time magazine (2 August 1943)
    • Also quoted by Generale Armando Diaz in "Il pensiero dei leoni" in Il Carroccio. The Italian review (1922) attributed to graffiti by an unknown soldier [4]
    • Though not precisely a repetition of any of them, this is somewhat resembles far earlier remarks attributed to others:
    • An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep.
      • Attributed to Alexander the Great, in The British Battle Fleet : Its Inception and Growth Throughout the Centuries to the Present Day (1915) by Frederick Thomas Jane
    • To live like a lion for a day is far better than to live like a jackal for a hundred years.
      • Tipu Sultan, as quoted in Encyclopedia of Asian History (1988) Vol. 4, p. 104
    • It is far better to live like a tiger for a day than to live like a jackal for a hundred years.
      • Tipu Sultan, as quoted in Tipu Sultan : A Study in Diplomacy and Confrontation (1982) by B. Sheikh Ali, p. 329
    • I should prefer an army of stags led by a lion, to an army of lions led by a stag.
      • Chabrias , as quoted in A Treatise on the Defence of Fortified Places (1814) by Lazare Carnot, p. 50
    • He has been frequently heard to say, that in this world he would rather live two days like a tiger, than two hundred years like a sheep.
      • Tipu Sultan, as quoted in A View of the Origin and Conduct of the War with Tippoo Sultaun; Comprising a Narrative of the Operations of the Army under the Command of Lieutenant-General George Harris, and of the Siege of Seringapatam (London, G. and W. Nicol, 1800) by Alexander Beatson, pp. 153-154. [5] [6]
  • Some still ask of us: what do you want? We answer with three words that summon up our entire program. Here they are…Italy, Republic, Socialization. . .Socialization is no other than the implantation of Italian Socialism…
    • Speech given by Mussolini to a group of Milanese Fascist veterans (October 14, 1944), quoted in Revolutionary Fascism, Erik Norling, Lisbon, Finis Mundi Press (2011) pp.119-120.
  • We are fighting to impose a higher social justice. The others are fighting to maintain the privileges of caste and class. We are proletarian nations that rise up against the plutocrats.
    • As quoted in “Soliloquy for ‘freedom’ Trimellone island”, on the Italian Island of Trimelone, journalist Ivanoe Fossani, one of the last interviews of Mussolini, March 20, 1945, from Opera omnia, vol. 32. Interview is also known as "Testament of Benito Mussolini, or Testamento di Benito Mussolini. Also published under “Mussolini confessed to the stars”, Publishing House Latinitas, Rome, 1952. (Intervista di Ivanoe Fossani, Soliloquio in “libertà” all'isola Trimellone, Isola del Trimellone, 20 marzo 1945)
  • For this I have been and am a socialist. The accusation of inconsistency has no foundation. My conduct has always been straight in the sense of looking at the substance of things and not to the form. I adapted socialisticamente to reality. As the evolution of society belied many of the prophecies of Marx, the true socialism folded from possible to probable. The only feasible socialism socialisticamente is corporatism, confluence, balance and justice interests compared to the collective interest.
    • As quoted in “Soliloquy for ‘freedom’ Trimellone island”, on the Italian Island of Trimelone, journalist Ivanoe Fossani, one of the last interviews of Mussolini, March 20, 1945, from Opera omnia, vol. 32. Interview is also known as "Testament of Benito Mussolini, or Testamento di Benito Mussolini. Also published under “Mussolini confessed to the stars”, Publishing House Latinitas, Rome, 1952. (Intervista di Ivanoe Fossani, Soliloquio in “libertà” all'isola Trimellone, Isola del Trimellone, 20 marzo 1945)
  • Shoot me in the chest.
    • Mussolini's last words (28 April 1945), as quoted in "Mussolini" by Peter Neville,(2004) p. 195

Undated

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  • You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!
    • As quoted by Mussolini in Mr. New York: The Autobiography of Grover A. Whalen by Grover Aloysius Whalen, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (1955) p. 188. Mussolini explained Fascism to Whalen in 1939.
  • 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.
    • As Quoted in The New Inquisitions: Heretic-Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism, Arthur Versluis, Oxford University Press (2006) p. 39.
  • [Marx was] the magnificent philosopher of working class violence.
    • As quoted by Mussolini in From George Sorel: Essays in Socialism and Philosophy by John L. Stanley (1987) p. 4.
  • In the whole negative part, we are alike. We and the Russians are against liberals, against democrats, against parliament.
    • As quoted in Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime, Richard Pipes, New York: NY, Vintage Books, 1995, p. 252, and in Yvon de Begnac, Palazzo Venezia: Storia di un Regime, Rome, 1950, p. 361.
  • The socialist revolution was a pure and simple question of ‘force.’… Between the [bourgeoisie and the proletariat] no accord is possible. One must disappear. The weaker will be ‘eliminated.’ The class struggle is therefore a question of ‘force.’
    • As quoted in The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, A. James Gregor, New York and London, The Free Press (1969) p. 106
  • The outbreak of a socialist revolution in one country will cause the others to imitate it or so to strengthen the proletariat as to prevent its national bourgeoisie from attempting any armed intervention.
    • As quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the 20th Century, Jacob Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 487
  • With the unleashing of a mighty clash of peoples, the bourgeoisie is playing its last card and calls forth on the world scene that which Karl Marx called the sixth great power: the socialist revolution.
    • As quoted in Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, Ernst Nolte, New York: NY, Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1966) p. 156. Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini, V, p. 121
  • Men do not move mountains; it is only necessary to create the illusion that mountains move.
    • As quoted in The Great Illusion, 1900-1914, Oron J. Hale, Harper & Row (1971) p. 109
  • The Socialists ask what is our program? Our program is to smash the heads of the Socialists.
    • Article in Popolo d'Italia, quoted in "A History of Terrorism" (2001) by Walter Laqueur, p. 71
  • Believe, obey, fight.
    • Mussolini and Fascism (2003) by Patricia Knight, p. 46
  • 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!
    • "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.
    • Carol F. Helstosky, Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy (2006)
  • I am making superhuman efforts to educate this people. When they have learnt to obey, they will believe what I tell them.
    • As quoted in The Tyrants: 2500 Years of Absolute Power and Corruption (2006) by Clive Foss ISBN 1905204965
  • I bequeath the republic to the republicans and not to the monarchists, and the work of social reform to the socialist and not to the middle class.
    • Joshua Muravchik, as quoted in Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, Encounter Books (2002) p. 170.


Disputed

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


Misattributed

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  • Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
    • This quote spread rapidly in the United States after appearing in a column by Molly Ivins (24 November 2002). It is repeated often and sometimes attributed to the "Fascism" entry in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana but does not appear there. A vaguely similar statement does appear in Doctrine of Fascism.
      • We are, in other words, a state which controls all forces acting in nature. We control political forces, we control moral forces, we control economic forces, therefore we are a full-blown Corporative state.
    • The same document explains that the "corporations" (corporazioni) on which the Fascist state rested were its own creations, modeled on guild associations and not private companies, which Italian normally calls società. For details see "Mussolini on the Corporate State" by Chip Berlet.
  • It may be expected that this will be a century of authority, a century of the Left, a century of Fascism.
    • From Jane Soames’s authorized translation of Mussolini’s “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism,” Hogarth Press, London, (1933), p. 20.[7] [8] Soames knew left from right in Italian, translating “Left” correctly on page 7 “a Left Revolutionary movement also appeared, which… laid the foundations of Bolshevism.”Julius Evola reproduced the original Italian as "un secolo della 'Destra'" ("a century of the right"); see Evola, Fascismo e Terzo Reich. Several English translations agree with Evola's wording, including one published by the Fascist government in 1935 and transcribed online.[9]
  • The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.
    • Austin O'Malley, in Keystones of Thought (1914), p. 27
  • If I advance; follow me! If I retreat; kill me! If I die; avenge me!
    • Mussolini actually repeated this sentence various times but the quote didn't originate with him. Attributed to Mussolini by G. K. Chesterton in G. K's Weekly (1925), and later appearing in "Duce (1922-42)" in Time magazine (2 August 1943), this actually originates with Henri de la Rochejaquelein (1793), as quoted in Narrative of the French Expedition in Egypt, and the Operations in Syria (1816) by Jacques Miot

Quotes about Mussolini

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Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff.
— Ernest Hemingway (1923)
 
The difference between the Italian railway service in 1919, 1920 and 1921 and that which obtained during the first year of the Mussolini regime was almost beyond belief.
– Kenneth L. Roberts (1924)
Alphabetized by author
  • Stalin will never make socialism; rather Mussolini will.
    • Nicola Bombacci as quoted in Mussolini, R.J.B. Bosworth, New York: NY, Bloomsbury Academic (2011) p. 511, originally from the Fascist newspaper La Verità (March 1945).
  • Mussolini was the son of a blacksmith, Hitler was the son of a house painter and I am the son of a miller.
    • Mussolini è stato il figlio del fabbro, hitler è stato il figlio di un imbianchino e io sono il figlio di un mugnaio .
  • Long live Mussolini! Long live socialism!
    • Nicola Bombacci before being shot with Mussolini in 1945. Quoted in Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism by Joshua Muravchik, (2002) p. 171
  • Which European politician of the first half of the twentieth century could be relied on to read the philosophical and literary works of his co-nationals and send their authors notes of criticism and congratulation? Who, at the time of profound crisis and despite his evident ill health, kept on his desk a copy of the works of Socrates and Plato, annotated in his own hand? Who declared publicly that he loved trees and anxiously quizzed his bureaucracy about storm damage to the environment? Who, in his table talk while he was entrenched in power, was fascinated by the task of tracing his intellectual antecedents?... Who seemed almost always ready to grant an interview and, having done so, was especially pleased by the prospect of talking about contemporary political and philosophical ideas? Who left more than 44 volumes of his collected works? Who claimed with an element of truth that money never dirtied his hands? Who could conduct a conversation in three languages apart from his own?... The somewhat surprising answer to all these questions is Benito Mussolini, Duce of Italian Fascism and dictator of Italy from 1922 (or 1925) to 1945 (or 1943).
    • R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini (New Edition), London and New York, Bloomsbury Academic (2010) p. 7
  • As the elections were being held, he published in Gerarchla a disquisition on Machiavelli. He had, he remarked, just re-read the Florentine writer's corpus, although, he added modestly, he had not fully plumbed the secondary literature in Italy and abroad. Machiavelli's thought was, Mussolini announced, more alive now than ever. His pessimism about human nature was eternal in its acuity. Individuals simply could not be relied on voluntarily to 'obey the law, pay their taxes and serve in war'. No well-ordered society could want the people to be sovereign. Machiavelli’s cynical acumen exposed the fatuity of the dreams of the Enlightenment (and of Mussolini’s own political philosophy before 1914).
    • R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini (New Edition), London and New York, Bloomsbury Academic (2010) p. 157
  • Los Hitler, los Mussolini.../¡Balas! ¡Balas! ¡Balas! ¡Balas!/Las dos víboras de Europa/que con la muerte se pactan.
    • The Hitlers, the Mussolinis.../Bullets! Bullets! Bullets! Bullets!/The two vipers of Europe/who pact with death.
    • Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos (1982)
  • The methods of the Duce are not by any means American methods...[but] methods which would certainly not appeal to this country might easily appeal to a people so differently constituted as are the Italians
    • Department Western European Division William Castle, 1927 quoted in Deterring Democracy (1992) by Noam Chomsky, London:Vintage, pp.37-38
  • A modern man may disapprove of some of his sweeping reforms, and approve others; but finds it difficult not to admire even where he does not approve.
  • [One of the] leading statesmen in the world.
    • Richard Washburn Child, former ambassador to the U.S and ghost-writer of Mussolini's autobiography, as quoted in Introduction: A Political-Biographical Sketch by Tariq Ali in Class War Conservatism and Other Essays (2015) by Ralph Miliband.
  • 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.
  • At Easter 1934 we paid a visit to Rome, where I had an interview with the Duce. I was favourably impressed. There were no histrionics, nor was I obliged, as I had been told would happen, to walk the length of a long room from the door to his desk. He met me at the door and accompanied me to it when I left. We agreed on the importance of rearmament and he laughed when I said that the idea that armaments produced war was as foolish as to think that umbrellas produced rain. Because he laughed at my joke I thought he had a sense of humour and was quite prepared to imagine he had other good qualities. It is too early to pronounce a final verdict upon Mussolini. The more I read about him, especially in the pages of Ciano, the less I like him, but no trustworthy biography has yet been written, so that it is wiser to withhold judgment. He is not, like Hitler, condemned out of his own mouth, nor by the notoriety and magnitude of his evil deeds. It may be that he began well and meant well, like so many of the Caesars before him, but that he ended ill as they did owing to the corruption of power.
  • 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 Government and the Governed: A History of Political Ideas and Political Practice (1939)
  • The truth is probably that since Mussolini's own policy is by nature opportunist and agnostic, he finds it quite impossible to believe in the British faith in a new system of international order.
    • Anthony Eden, report to the British government after his meeting with Baron Aloisi, the Italian delegate to the League of Nations (August 1935), quoted in Anthony Eden, The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators (1962), p. 250
  • Mussolini has the mentality of a gangster.
    • Anthony Eden, minute (24 July 1937), quoted in Anthony Eden, The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators (1962), p. 451
  • The luncheon party [on 24 June 1935] was quite a large one, with ladies present. This occasion displayed to me the astonishing contrast between the two Mussolinis. When alone and in serious discussion, the Duce was calm, relaxed and reasonable, at least in my experience. There were no attitudes or airs. But the moment more than two or three were gathered together the man was transformed, jaw thrust out, eyes rolling and popping, figure strutting and attitudinizing. When luncheon was announced, Mussolini made a imperious gesture towards me and marched on. I hung back, English fashion, waiting for the ladies, and the Duce strode in alone.
    • Anthony Eden, The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators (1962), p. 225
  • The League's withdrawal of sanctions brought hope to many that good relations between Italy and Britain could now be restored. The argument often put to me was that, if we would only make a concession to the Duce, he would reciprocate and our relations would soon mend. I had little confidence that this would be so, for the reasoning appeared to be founded on a misreading of Mussolini's character. To me, he was a tough and clever opportunist, who would rate concessions as weakness and who cared nothing for the principles of the League or for the Stresa front. He would incline to whichever side seemed to offer him the greater advantages. We could not, for moral and practical reasons, enter such a competition or offer him the plunder he sought; therefore Hitler and Mussolini would inevitably be drawn closer together. The Duce had made his choice between African adventure and European stability. He abandoned Austria when he marched against Abyssinia. Despite rumours, Mussolini and I had no personal quarrel and our relations were not a factor in the unfolding of policy on either side.
    • Anthony Eden, The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators (1962), pp. 421-422
  • 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
  • Benito Mussolini was the first European leader not only to dispense with multi-party democracy but also to proclaim a new fascist regime. A blacksmith's son, a socialist and the author of two crudely anticlerical books, The Cardinal's Mistress and John Huss the Veracious, Mussolini had switched to nationalism even before the Italian Socialists opposed their country's entry into the First World War. The Roman fasces - the bundle of rods of chastisement that symbolized the power of the state - had been adopted by various pro-war groups; it was one of these that Mussolini joined. Here was the formula for fascism: socialism plus nationalism plus war. After a brief and undistinguished period of military service, Mussolini reverted to journalism, his true métier. But his political moment came with peace. Like their counterparts all over Europe, Italy's political establishment felt vulnerable as the Bolshevik contagion swept into the factories of Turin and the villages of the Po Valley. With his flashy charisma, Mussolini offered an echo of Francesco Crispi, the hero of the previous generation of Italian nationalists. With his newly formed Fasci di Combattimento, he offered muscle in the form of gangs of ex-soldiers, the squadristi.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp.  227-228
  • Even before his distinctly theatrical March on Rome on October 29,1922 - which was more photo-opportunity than coup, since the fascists lacked the capability to seize power by force - Mussolini was invited to form a government by the king, Victor Emmanuel III, who had declined to impose martial law. The old Liberals were confident they could continue business as usual. They underestimated Mussolini's appetite for power; it was entirely in character that at one point he held seven ministerial portfolios as well as the premiership. The press, the only thing he was competent to control, began to promote him as an omnipotent Duce, but behind the surface glamour there was always the threat of violence. Following the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 (almost certainly ordered by Mussolini) political opposition was suppressed. The likes of the Leninist Antonio Gramsci were consigned to prison. Henceforth, the National Fascist Party brooked no competitors. Newspaper editors were required to be fascists, and teachers to swear an oath of loyalty. Parliament and even trade unions continued to exist, but as sham entities, subordinated to Mussolini's dictatorship.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p.  
  • Recently the New York Sun reported that when auditors got into the books of Mussolini's treasury, after his fall, they discovered that a large part of his deficit was due to the paying out of huge sums in subsidies to conceal the rise in the cost of living - a plan industriously urged here by the Hansen group and adopted by the President but as yet resisted by Congress.
    • John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (1944, Doubleday & Co, Inc) p. 185
  • To Benito Mussolini, from an old man who greets in the ruler, the Hero of Culture.
    • Sigmund Freud, in a 1933 dedication sent in a gift copy of the book Warum Krieg? which he had co-written with Albert Einstein, as quoted in Fascist Spectacle : The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (2000) by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, p. 53; Photo of dedication
  • Mussolini rose from humble origins, made a career in journalism and became a persuasive politician. He created the Fascist Party whose violence intimidated the Italian government into making him Prime Minister. He transformed Italy into a one-party dictatorship. He was a master of propaganda, with grandiose ideas derived from the Roman Empire. Mussolini was fatally convinced that he was always right and that Italy was a great military power. He squandered the country's resources on a useless Empire, then blindly followed Adolf Hitler into the war that led him to disaster. After being dismissed from office, he ran a German puppet regime in northern Italy.
    • Clive Foss, The Tyrants: 2500 Years of Absolute Power and Corruption, London: Quercus Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1905204965, p. 148
  • I feel like turning to my American friends and asking them whether they don't think we too need a man like Mussolini.
  • Still, the democratic governments are jabbering about these things, while Germany and Italy continue to pour in thousands of trained soldiers. It should be obvious to the blind that not only Hitler and Mussolini but Mr. Blum and Mr. Baldwin are in league in their intentions to crush the anti-fascist struggle and to drown in the blood of the Spanish people the maginificent beginnings of a new social structure.
    • Emma Goldman, Letter to Mark Mratchny, 1937, quoted in Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution, edited by David Porter, 2006, (p. 186).
  • To be sure the Mussolinis and Hitlers are guilty of the same crime. They and their propaganda machines mow down every political opponent in their way. They also have added character assassination to the butchery of their victims.
    • Emma Goldman "The Tragedy of the Political Exiles" (1934) in The Nation
  • Once in power, Mussolini, established the model totalitarian state. Having smashed the organisations of the workers, the way was prepared for a savage attack on the standards of the masses in the interests of Big Business. The main brunt of fascism was borne by the working class, against whom it is aimed above all. With their weapons of struggle broken, with the establishment of scab company unions, the conditions were created to drive down the wages and lower the standards of living of the workers. The Labour unions were crushed. Shop stewards' representation in the factories was abolished. The right to strike ended. All Union contracts were rendered void. The employer reigned supreme in the factories once again. He became at the same tune, the "leader" of his employees. Any attempt to strike, any resistance to the wishes of the employer, was "punished with ferocious, penalties by the State. To challenge the employer was to challenge the full force of the State. In the words of the fascists: strikes are crimes "against the social community".
    • Trotskyite Communist Ted Grant,The Menace of Fascism", 1948. [10]
  • Whatever one thinks of his Marxism today, Mussolini was accepted by his socialist peers as a Marxist theoretician. He rose to leadership in the Italian Socialist Party at least in part on the basis of his recognized capacity as a ‘socialist’ intellectual.
    • A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, New York and London, The Free Press, (1969) p. 99
  • On November 24, 1914, when he was expelled from the Socialist Party, Mussolini insisted that his expulsion could not divest him of his ‘socialist faith.’ He made the subtitle of his new paper, Popolo d’Italia, ‘A Socialist Daily.’ National intervention in the European conflagration was an immediate issue and as a problem it divided socialists, but since most continental socialist parties had opted for war, Mussolini conceived at that time that interventionism was not a commitment sufficient to require the abandonment of socialism.
    • A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, New York and London, The Free Press, (1969) p. 141
  • By 1938, Mussolini could confidently assert that ‘in the face of the total collapse of the system [bequeathed] by Lenin, Stalin has covertly transformed himself into a Fascist.’
    • A. James Gregor, The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, Princeton University Press (1974) p. 132
  • Mussolini was a Marxist ‘heretic'.
    • A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, p. xi.
  • Mussolini insisted that Fascism was the only form of ‘socialism’ appropriate to the ‘proletarian nations’ of the twentieth century.
    • A. James Gregor, Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, New Brunswick: NJ, Transaction Press, 2009, p. 191
  • When the workers first occupied the factories, Mussolini bethought himself of ‘Red Week.’ This time [summer of 1920] he concluded, social revolution was really at hand. Eager as always to ride the wave of the future and still posing as a left-wing extremist, he applauded the strikes. But as soon as it became apparent that he had guessed wrong once again, he executed an abrupt about-face.
    • S. William Halperin, Mussolini and Italian Fascism, Princeton: NJ, D. Van Nostrand Company (1964) pp. 32-33
  • 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.
  • Mussolini used to shout, "Believe, follow, and act," and told his followers that fascism, before being a party, had been a religion.
    • Chris Hedges American fascists : the Christian Right and the war on America (2007)
  • Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff. The shooting would be a bluff.
  • The Fascist dictator had announced that he would receive the press. Everybody came. We all crowded into the room. Mussolini sat at his desk reading a book.… Mentally he was already reading the lines of the two thousand newspapers served by the two hundred correspondents. "As we entered the room the Black Shirt Dictator did not look up from the book he was reading, so intense was his concentration, etc." I tip-toed over behind him to see what the book was that he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French-English dictionary—held upside down.
    • Ernest Hemingway, Toronto Daily Star (27 January 1923)
  • The Brown shirt would probably not have existed without the Black shirt. The march on Rome in 1922 was one of the turning points of history. The mere fact that anything of the sort could be attempted and could succeed, gave us impetus... If Mussolini had been outdistanced by Marxism, I don’t know whether we could have succeeded in holding out. At that time National Socialism was a very fragile growth. As I walked with him in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I could easily compare his profile with that of the Roman busts, and I realized he was one of the Caesars. There's no doubt at all that Mussolini is the heir of the great men of that period.
  • I have myself seen in a dozen different episodes in Italy how very popular the Duce is with the majority of the people; and there is no denying the unparalleled achievements of this man and of Fascism—the innumerable new factories, the construction of new houses and schools and hospitals, the great colonial enterprise and many more; when one recalls the deplorable state of Italy at the time of the Duce’s assumption of power, one realises the magnitude of his achievements. Over and above all this he overcame Bolshevism, not by military force, but by superior intellect, and it is him we have to thank for showing for the first time, by his decisive defeat of the inner power of Bolshevism, that even in this twentieth century it is possible to recall a people to a sense of purely national pride.
  • We include all those who today stand as our allies, above all the state that has suffered the same misery, indeed, in part even greater misery than Germany itself: Italy. The Duce-and I know this-sees this battle no differently than we do. His is a poor land, overpopulated, always disadvantaged, never knowing where its daily bread will come from. He and I have sworn an oath, and no power on earth can break that bond! There were two revolutions at different times, and in different forms, but with a common goal. They will reach their common goals together.
  • You express amazement at my statement that 'civilized' men try to justify their looting, butchering and plundering by claiming that these things are done in the interests of art, progress and culture. That this simple statement of fact should cause surprize, amazes me in return. People claiming to possess superior civilization have always veneered their rapaciousness by such claims... Your friend Mussolini is a striking modern-day example. In that speech of his I heard translated he spoke feelingly of the expansion of civilization. From time to time he has announced; 'The sword and civilization go hand in hand!' 'Wherever the Italian flag waves it will be as a symbol of civilization!' 'Africa must be brought into civilization!' It is not, of course, because of any selfish motive that he has invaded a helpless country, bombing, burning and gassing both combatants and non-combatants by the thousands. Oh, no, according to his own assertions it is all in the interests of art, culture and progress, just as the German war-lords were determined to confer the advantages of Teutonic Kultur on a benighted world, by fire and lead and steel. Civilized nations never, never have selfish motives for butchering, raping and looting; only horrid barbarians have those.
  • Mussolini was a reluctant fascist because, underneath, he remained a Marxist, albeit a heretical one.
  • Mussolini began as a disciple of Lenin and did not so much repudiate Marxism-Leninism as become a self-declared “heretic.” Thus one of Mussolini’s groups of thugs called itself the Cheka, after Lenin’s secret police.
  • Mussolini has substituted efficient and energetic and progressive processes of government for Parliamentary wrangling and wasteful impotent bureaucracy. He has engendered among the people a spirit of order, discipline, hard work, patriotic devotion and faith.… Italy has attained extraordinary progress, in every respect thanks to the clear sighted and masterful guidance of that remarkable man, Benito Mussolini.".
  • A very upstanding chap [who has] done a good job in Italy … [I] continue to be impressed with the innate strength of the present government and sound ideas which govern it.
    • Thomas Lamont, J. P. Morgan partner after a meeting in May 1923; quoted in Rome in America (2005) by Peter R. D'Agostino
  • 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, as quoted in "Third World Ideology and Western Reality" (1986) by Carlos Rangel, p. 15
  • Mussolini was the only one among you with the mind and temperament to make a revolution. Why did you allow him to leave?
    • Vladimir Lenin to the Italian Socialists, as quoted in Farrell, "Mussolini: A New Life," Chapter 3
  • In Italy, comrades, in Italy there was but a Socialist able enough to lead the people through a revolutionary path, Benito Mussolini.
    • Vladimir Lenin, as quoted in Revolutionary Fascism, Erik Norling, Lisbon, Finis Mundi Press (2011) p. 28. Lenin express this to Nicola Bombacci during a reception in the Kremlin.
  • 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.,
  • [Mussolini] was never a reformist, but always an extreme left or revolutionary socialist.
    • Gaudens Megaro, Mussolini in the Making, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, (1938) p. 98
  • Mussolini regarded himself as a true heretic not only with respect to religion but also with respect to reformist socialism. It was a serious mistake, he maintained, to confuse socialism with the socialist parties.
    • Gaudens Megaro, Mussolini in the Making, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York (1938) p. 125
  • Therefore, [Mussolini] envisaged the class struggle as a war between two minorities, the bourgeois minority and the revolutionary minority. His absorbing ambition was to be a leading protagonist, a Duce of the revolutionary minority or élite. In matters of revolutionary tactics and strategy, he was a thoroughgoing Blanquist, and he might well have been called a spiritual brother of Lenin. Like Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Mussolini was not as much concerned with the organization of a mass party of workers on a democratic basis as he was with forming a group of ardent, resolute revolutionists who would be prepared to execute a violent revolutionary uprising and to lead, if not to ‘drag along’, the mass of workers to support such an act.
    • Gaudens Megaro, Mussolini in the Making, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, (1938) p. 187
  • One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a politician. Indeed, he is probably the most perfect specimen of the genus politician on view in the world today. His career has been impeccably classical. Beginning life as a ranting Socialist of the worst type, he abjured Socialism the moment he saw better opportunities for himself on the other side, and ever since then he has devoted himself gaudily to clapping Socialists in jail, filling them with castor oil, sending blacklegs to burn down their houses, and otherwise roughing them. Modern politics has produced no more adept practitioner.
    • H. L. Mencken, in "Mussolini" in the Baltimore Evening Sun (3 August 1931), also in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy : New Selections from the Writings of America's Legendary Editor, Critic, and Wit (1994) edited by Terry Teachout, p. 34
  • You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist.
  • [Mussolini] has always retained a great admiration for Bolshevism, though he presented himself to the public as an antidote to Bolshevism.
    • Francesco Saverio Nitti, Bolshevism, Fascism and Democracy, former Prime Minister of Italy (1919-1920), (1927) p. 73.
  • My generation really grew up at a very scary time. This time is probably twice as scary, but since we didn't know this time was coming-the Second World War was coming, the Spanish Civil War was happening when I was in high school. Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia and made all those idiotic statements that are famous to this day. Like how beautiful it was to bomb the Ethiopians. The Italian kids in my school were in heaven, they were so delighted and proud they were fainting with joy. It was a scary time. Hitler was coming inch by inch by inch. I remember my parents talking about it.
  • Even if [in defining 'fascism'] we limit ourselves to our own century and its two most notorious cases, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, we find that they display profound differences. How can we lump together Mussolini and Hitler, the one surrounded by Jewish henchmen and a Jewish mistress, the other an obsessed antisemite?
    • Robert O. Paxton, "Five Stages of Fascism." The Journal of Modern History, Vol 70 no. 1 (March, 1998)
  • The sweeping social changes proposed by Mussolini's first Fascist program of April 1919 (including the vote for women, the eight-hour day, heavy taxation of war profits, confiscation of church lands, and workers' participation in industrial management) stand in flagrant conflict with the macho persona of the later Duce and his deals with conservatives.
    • Robert O. Paxton, "Five Stages of Fascism." The Journal of Modern History, Vol 70 no. 1 (March, 1998)
  • Mussolini would be totally forgotten today if some of his lieutenants in the provinces had not discovered different vocations -- bashing Slovenes in Trieste in July 1920 and bashing socialist organizers of farm workers in the Po Valley in fall and winter 1920-21. Mussolini supported these new initiatives by the ras, and his movement turned into something else, thereafter prospering mightily.
    • Robert O. Paxton, "Five Stages of Fascism." The Journal of Modern History, Vol 70 no. 1 (March, 1998)
  • Neither Hitler nor Mussolini took the helm by force, even if they used force earlier to destablize the liberal regime and later to transform their governments into dictatorships.
    • Robert O. Paxton, "Five Stages of Fascism." The Journal of Modern History, Vol 70 no. 1 (March, 1998)
  • Mussolini spoke of himself as an 'authoritarian' and 'aristocratic' Socialist; he was elitist and antiparliamentarian, and he believed in regenerative violence. Like the revolutionary syndicalists (and, in a different manner, Lenin), Mussolini believed that only a special revolutionary vanguard could create a new revolutionary society.
    • Stanley G. Payne A History of Fascism 1914-1945, The University of Wisconsin Press (1995) p. 83
  • Mussolini was the greatest man of our century, but he committed certain disastrous 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.
  • Even as the Fascist leader, Mussolini never concealed his sympathy and admiration for Communism: he thought highly of Lenin’s ‘brutal energy,’ and saw nothing objectionable in Bolshevik massacres of hostages. He proudly claimed Italian Communism as his child.
    • Richard Pipes, Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime, New York: NY, Vintage Books (1995) p. 252.
  • Given the opportunity, Mussolini would have been glad as late as 1920-21 to take under his wing the Italian Communists, for whom he felt great affinities: greater, certainly, than for democratic socialists, liberals and conservatives. Genetically, Fascism issued from the 'Bolshevik' wing of Italian socialism, not from any conservative ideology or movement.
    • Richard Pipes Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime, New York: NY, Vintage Books (1995) p. 253
  • Your figure is not just an Italian one. You are the apostle of the world campaign against dissolution and anarchy...Fascism...is a universal phenomenon that ought to conquer all nations...Fascism is a living Gospel.
    • General Miguel Primo de Rivera quoted in R.J.B. Bosworth, "Italian Fascism and Models of Fascism" in The Italian Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini & Fascism (1998), p.207
  • Yes, all Africa remembers that it was Litvinov who stood alone beside Haile Selassie in Geneva, when Mussolini's sons flew with the blessings of the Pope to drop bombs on Ethiopian women and children.
    • Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson Speaks: The Negro and The Soviet Union (1978), p. 238
  • The difference between the Italian railway service in 1919, 1920 and 1921 and that which obtained during the first year of the Mussolini regime was almost beyond belief. The cars were clean, the employees were snappy and courteous, and trains arrived at and left the stations on time — not fifteen minutes late, and not five minutes late; but on the minute.
  • Mussolini accelerated the process after the conquest of Ethiopia (1935-6). The war in Africa was to provide a new context for Fascism’s scheme of social engineering.
    • Davide Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War, Cambridge University Press (2006) p. 44
  • 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, Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. ''Three New Deals : Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939. Macmillan. 
  • I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman.
    • Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as quoted Wolfgang Schivelbusch (2006). Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939, Metropolitan Books, p. 31
  • The meeting between Chesterton and Il Duce occurred in 1929, ten years before the war, at a time when, whatever his other faults, Mussolini had reintroduced a mark spirit of optimism and freshness to an Italy that had formerly been pessimistic and stagnant. Throughout the 1920s, Chesterton thought he saw in the Italian leader qualities that might have offset certain evils in Britain. It is important to keep in mind that whatever the misreadings of fascism, Chesterton always had some quite specific British problem in view when he praises Mussolini.
    • Robert Royal, in "The Pearl of Great Price", his Introduction to "The Resurrection of Rome" (1930) by G. K. Chesterton in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (1990) by Vol. XXI, p. 272
  • For Chesterton… British public rhetoric was more than a mere style: "The motive is the desire to disguise a thing even when expressing it." To his mind, the dictator's words, even if his actions were as bad or worse than those of the parliamentarians, were morally and stylistically superior. At least they said openly what was being done openly. The British rhetoric, for Chesterton, was one with the decayed British liberalism that allowed exploitation of workers by plutocrats who were never rebuked by government or the courts. If nothing else, Mussolini's language was a bracing alternative.
    Gazing back across the horrors of World War II, it is hard for us to imagine how good men like Chesterton, whatever their objections to British liberalism, could admire Mussolini, though several prominent intellectuals and politicians did. Many of us have family members or friends who fought or died to stop the fascist darkness, and we find it difficult to sympathize with Chesterton's desire to be fair to Mussolini. Mussolini's thuggish violence, of course, Chesterton and others rejected. But their admiration was an index of the scale of reform they thought needed.
    • Robert Royal, in "The Pearl of Great Price", his Introduction to "The Resurrection of Rome" (1930) by G. K. Chesterton in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (1990) by Vol. XXI, p. 274
  • Some of the things Mussolini has done, and some that he is threatening to do go further in the direction of Socialism than the English Labour Party could yet venture if they were in power.
  • [Mussolini was] farther to the Left in his political opinions than any of his socialist rivals.
    • George Bernard Shaw as quoted in Socialism and Superior Brains, Gareth Griffith, Taylor and Francis e-Library (2003) p. 253. Shaw made this statement in the Manchester Guardian in 1927.
  • Roosevelt had no illusions about revolution. Mussolini and Stalin seemed to him ‘not mere distant relatives’ but ‘blood brothers.’
    • Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. III), New York: NY, Mariner Book: Houghton Mifflin Co. (2003) p. 648
  • Mussolini told the young man of his admiration for Communism—‘Fascism is the same thing’ [as Communism].
    • As quoted in The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. III), Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., New York: NY, Mariner Book: Houghton Mifflin Co., (2003) p. 147. Mussolini’s 1931 statement to Alfred Bingham, the son of a U.S. Republican Senator.
  • So fell, ignominiously, the modern Roman Caesar, a bellicose-sounding man of the twentieth century who had known how to profit from its confusions and despair, but who underneath the gaudy facade was made largely of sawdust. As a person he was not unintelligent. He had read widely in history and thought he understood its lessons. But as a dictator he had made the fatal mistake of seeking to make a martial, imperial Great Power of a country which lacked the industrial resources to become one and whose people, unlike the Germans, were too civilized, too sophisticated, too down to earth to be attracted by such false ambitions. The Italian people, at heart, had never, like the Germans, embraced fascism. They had merely suffered it, knowing that it was a passing phase, and Mussolini toward the end seems to have realized this. But like all dictators he was carried away by power, which, as it inevitably must, corrupted him, corroding his mind and poisoning his judgment. This led him to his second fatal mistake of tying his fortunes and those of Italy to the Third Reich. When the bell began to toll for Hitler's Germany it began to toll for Mussolini's Italy, and as the summer of 1943 came the Italian leader heard it. But there was nothing he could do to escape his fate. By then he was a prisoner of Hitler.
  • Not a gun was fired- not even by the Fascist militia- to save him. Not a voice was raised in his defense. No one seemed to mind the humiliating nature of his departure- being hauled away from the King's presence to jail in an ambulance. On the contrary, there was general rejoicing at his fall. Fascism collapsed as easily as its founder.
  • Living in New York, she (Angelica Balabanoff) discovered support for Mussolini in some Italian-American and conservative circles before the United States entered World War II, and so she edited and wrote a small periodical, Il Traditore, which between January, 1942, and May, 1943, contained a series of articles describing Mussolini's early years, his persecution of socialists, and the fascist record of assassinations and brutality in Italy."
    • Jane Slaughter, “Humanism versus Feminism in the Socialist Movement: The Life of Angelica Balabanoff” in European Women on the Left (1981)
  • [Mussolini] brought a radical Marxist strand to the Avanti! newspaper, soon doubling its circulation. With a growing audience, Mussolini redoubled the urgency of his utopian propaganda; ‘private property is theft’ and should be abolished as Italy moved through the phase of collectivism forwards to the ultimate goal of communism.
  • The Mussolini that now emerges is more intelligent, less tinsel and stage property than some had supposed, more than the mere gangster and bluffer that others have seen, on the whole a more sinister phenomenon for the student’s science of politics. Here is a real intellectual who has run the gamut of radical revolutionary ideas—anti-patriotism, anti-religion (not merely anti-clericalism), anarchism, bolshevistic communism in the Leninist sense, all genuinely and vehemently advocated—and has come out the simon-pure imperialistic despot, who uses throne and altar, brutal violence and fraud, to buttress his autocratic regime.
    • Mussolini in the Making, book review by Henry R. Spencer, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 55, Issue 1, March 1940 pp. 148-149, published 15 March 1940, author: Gaudens Megaro, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1938
  • Lenin was the contemporary politician whom [Mussolini] most admired and he studied the Russian revolution closely to see what lessons it offered. Lenin seemed to him ‘the very negation of socialism’ because he had not created a dictatorship of the proletariat or of the socialist party, but only of a few intellectuals who had found the secret of winning power. Mussolini was, in truth, envious.
  • Mussolini had once belonged to the Bolshevik wing of the Italian Socialist party and still in 1924 confessed admiration for Lenin, while Trotsky was quoted as saying that Mussolini was his best pupil.
    • Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini: A Biography, New York: NY, Vintage Books, (1983) p. 96
  • [In 1938] Mussolini anti-clericalism was thus reassuring itself. Sometimes he now acknowledged that he was an outright disbeliever... [that] the papacy was a malignant tumor in the body of Italy and must 'be rooted out once and for all,’ because there was no room in Rome for both the Pope and himself.
    • Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini: A Biography, New York: NY, Vintage Books (1983) p. 222
  • Mussolini had been envious of the bolsheviks and for a while fancied himself as the Lenin of Italy.
    • Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History, University of Michigan Press (1997) p. 284, called himself the "Lenin of Italy" in 1919.
  • After his defeat in the 1919 election, Mussolini saw no future in trying to out-socialist the socialists. Without a distinct policy, without friends and backing, he was in serious danger of ending up as a confused and egocentric demagogue with a talent for histrionics.
    • Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History, University of Michigan Press (1997) p. 297
  • [Mussolin is] a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin. . . not a socialist from the bourgeoisie; he never believed in parliamentary socialism.
    • Georges Sorel as quoted in Myth of the Nation and Vision of Revolution: Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century, Jacob L. Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 451. Originally from Jean Variot in L'Eclair, (September 11, 1922), and Propos de Georges Sorel (1935)
  • From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left.
  • Like all self-respecting revolutionaries, Mussolini considered himself a Marxist. He regarded Marx as the ‘greatest theoretician of socialism’ and Marxism as the ‘scientific doctrine of class revolution.’
    • Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznajder, Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, Princeton: NJ, Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 197.
  • In the tragic days of Mussolini, the trains in Italy ran on time as never before and I am told in their way, their horrible way, that the Nazi concentration-camp system in Germany was a model of horrible efficiency. The really basic thing in government is policy. Bad administration, to be sure, can destroy good policy, but good administration can never save bad policy.
    • Adlai Stevenson, Speech to the Los Angeles Town Club, Los Angeles, California (11 September 1952); Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952), p. 36.
  • By then the Duce... was a sick man, living on a diet of milk and rice, whose political strength at home was growing more feeble by the day. In late 1942, he had tried to talk Hitler into making peace with the Russians. It was their only chance to avoid disaster, he argued. The Fuehrer, of course, would have none of it. About all Mussolini was good for now, it seemed, was strutting about in one of his snappy getups. But then, at least he still looked like he amounted to something.
    • C.L. Sulzberger, in his book The American Heritage Picture History of World War II (1966), p. 321
  • in 1926 I was asked to go to Italy to report on the Fascist State of Benito Mussolini, now four years in power, a scandal to the democracies at which he openly jeered, but an even greater one to the Socialists and Communists who once had thought him on the way to being the strongest radical leader in Europe…Altogether it was an illuminating half-hour, and when Mussolini accompanied me to the door and kissed my hand in the gallant Italian fashion I understood for the first time an unexpected phase of the man which makes him such a power in Italy. He might be and was, I believed-a fearful despot, but he had a dimple.
  • Fascism never possessed the ruthless drive, let alone the material strength, of National Socialism. Morally it was just as corrupting – or perhaps more so from its very dishonesty. Everything about Fascism was a fraud. The social peril from which it saved Italy was a fraud; the revolution by which it seized power was a fraud; the ability and policy of Mussolini were fraudulent. Fascist rule was corrupt, incompetent, empty; Mussolini himself a vain, blundering boaster without either ideas or aims.
  • [Mussolini] was the only man who could have brought about the revolution of the proletariat in Italy.
    • Leon Trotsky as quoted in Il Duce: The Life and Work of Benito Mussolini, by L. Kemechey, New York: NY, Richard R. Smith (1930) p. 47.
  • Two years after its inception, fascism was in power. It entrenched itself thanks to the facts the first period of its overlordship coincided with a favorable economic conjuncture, which followed the depression of 1921-22. The fascists crushed the retreating proletariat by the onrushing forces of the petty bourgeoisie. But this was not achieved at a single blow. Even after he assumed power, Mussolini proceeded on his course with due caution: he lacked as yet ready-made models. During the first two years, not even the constitution was altered. The fascist government took on the character of a coalition. In the meantime, the fascist bands were busy at work with clubs, knives, and pistols. Only thus was the fascist government created slowly, which meant the complete strangulation of all independent mass organizations.
    • Leon Trotsky, "How Mussolini Triumphed" in What Next? Vital Question for the German Proletariat, 1932 [11].
  • There is no doubt which I preferred between Mussolini and Roosevelt. In my radio broadcasts I spoke in favor of the economic construction of Fascism. Mussolini was a very human, imperfect character who lost his head.
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  1. ↑ Sestani, Armando, ed (10 February 2012). "Il confine orientale: una terra, molti esodi" (in Italian). I profugi istriani, dalmati e fiumani a Lucca. Instituto storico della Resistenca e dell'Età Contemporanea in Provincia di Lucca. pp. 12–13. 
  2. ↑ Pirjevec, Jože (2008). "The Strategy of the Occupiers". Resistance, Suffering, Hope: The Slovene Partisan Movement 1941–1945. p. 27. ISBN 978-961-6681-02-5. 
  3. ↑ a b Il discorso di Trieste. archivioluce. Retrieved on 2021-01-04.
  4. ↑ Priorelli, Giorgia (2020). "2". Italian Fascism and Spanish Falangism in Comparison: Constructing the Nation. Rome: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 38. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-46056-3. ISBN 978-3-030-46056-3. 
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