Quotes by Oriana Fallaci

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Because there are tens of thousands of Osama Bin Ladens by now, and they're not only in Afghanistan or in other Arabic countries. They're everywhere, and the most hardened ones are right in the Western world. In our cities, in our roads, in our universities, in the ganglions of technology. That technology that any dolt can handle. The Crusade has been in progress for some time. It works like a Swiss watch, sustained by a faith and a malice comparable only to the faith and malice of Torquemada when he led the Inquisition. The fact is that dealing with them is impossible. Reasoning, unthinkable. Treating them with indulgence, tolerance or hope, suicide. Whoever thinks differently is deluded.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Wake up, people. Wake up! Intimidated as you are by your fear of going against the current - that is, appearing racist (a word which is entirely inapt as we are speaking not about a race but about a religion) - you don't understand or don't want to understand that a reverse–Crusade is in progress. Accustomed as you are to the double–cross, blinded as you are by myopia, you don't understand or don't want to understand that a war of religion is in progress. Desired and declared by a fringe of that religion, perhaps, but a war of religion nonetheless. A war which they call Jihad. Holy War.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

You don't understand or don't want to understand that if we don't oppose them, if we don't defend ourselves, if we don't fight, the Jihad will win. And it will destroy the world that for better or worse we've managed to build, to change, to improve, to render a little more intelligent, that is to say, less bigoted - or even not bigoted at all. And with that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morals, our values, our pleasures.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

In the mad or sweet hugs your body that was not tried but your soul, your thoughts, your feelings, your dreams, your poems. And maybe it's true that love almost never relates to a body, often we choose or accept a person for inexplicable charm with which it hits us, or for what it represents to our eyes, our beliefs, to our morals; however, the vehicle of a loving relationship remains the body, and if that doesn't seduce you, something else has to seduce you. The character, for example, the way of living or the behavior. And in time I discovered that I didn't like a lot your character [...] So why had I the impulse to run after you, to hug you, feel your mustache against my cheek, why did I feel the need to scrape off the throat and send back the tears?

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Habit is the most infamous of ilnesses, because it makes us accept any accident, any pain, any death.
For habit we live next to odious people, you learn to carry the chains and to be subjected to injustice, to suffer, you resign to pain, to solitude, to all. Habit is the most merciless of poisons because it seeps in slowly, silently and it grows slowly fostering on our unawareness, and when we discover we have it on us every move is conditioned, no medicine exists than can heal us.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Poor dear: you've understood that thinking means suffering, that being intelligent means to be unhappy. Pity you missed out on a third fundamental point: pain is the salt of life and without it we wouldn't be human.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Our logic is full of contradictions. As soon as you state something, you see the opposite. And maybe you realize that the contrary is as valid as what you stated.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Life is a rocky road, rocks on which you trip, you fall, you hurt yourself.
Rocks against which you must protect yourself with iron shoes. But no even this is enough because while you protect your feet there's always someone who pick up a rock to hit you on the head with.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

"There are millions better than him!"
"There are millions better than me. In any case I don't know those better than him and I can't consume my life waiting to meet them. And we should, then, search for perfection in a man, you'd love saints. Saints are dead and I don't go to bed with calendars."

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Love's death is life the death of a loved one. It leaves the same torment, the same emptiness, the same refusal to dive up to that emptiness. If you've been waiting for it, caused it, wanted it to defend yourself or for common sense of for the need of freedom when it comes along you feel invalid. Mutilated.