Oriana Fallaci

I leave shreds of my soul on every experience.

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

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

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

What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It's their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.

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

I'm going to show you the real New York - witty, smart, and international - like any metropolis. Tell me this: where in Europe can you find old Hungary, old Russia, old France, old Italy? In Europe you're trying to copy America, you're almost American. But here you'll find Europeans who immigrated a hundred years ago - and we haven't spoiled them. Oh, Gio! You must see why I love New York. Because the whole world's in New York.

Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.

I've found what I was looking for, Child: what people call love between a man and a woman is a season. And if, at its flowering, this season is a feast of greenery, at its waning, it's only a heap of rotting leaves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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