Benito Mussolini Quotes

Believe, obey, fight.

Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say "But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time."

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."

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

Shoot me in the chest.

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.

If I advance; follow me! If I retreat; kill me! If I die; avenge me!

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.

Better to live a day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.

Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil and Augustus.

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 (l926) 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.

I don't like the look of him.

Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands and an infinite scorn in our hearts.

I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman.

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.

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.

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.

You're the top! You're the Great Houdini! You're the top! You are Mussolini!

The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.

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.

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.

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.

Long live Mussolini! Long live socialism!

Liberty is a duty, not a right.

He never killed anyone, he sent people on holiday to confine them.

Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Obviously the government of [Mussolini's] time, out of fear that German power might lead to complete victory, preferred to ally itself with Hitler's Germany rather than opposing it … The racial laws were the worst fault of Mussolini as a leader, who in so many other ways did well.

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 Truth Apparent, apparent to everyone's eyes how 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Chesteron, 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.

I am not a collector of deserts!

The greatest genius of the modern age.

Unfortunately, I am no superman like Mussolini.

War is the normal state of the people.

I want to make my own life a masterpiece.

[Marx was] the magnificent philosopher of working class violence.

Marx was the greatest of all theorists of socialism."

What is freedom? There is no such thing as absolute freedom!

For my part I prefer fifty thousand rifles to five million votes.

We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.

Speeches made to the people are essential to the arousing of enthusiasm for a war.

Religion is a species of mental disease. It has always had a pathological reaction on mankind.

[Mussolini was] farther to the Left in his political opinions than any of his socialist rivals.

To Benito Mussolini, from an old man who greets in the ruler, the Hero of Culture.

The Socialists ask what is our program? Our program is to smash the heads of the Socialists.

[Mussolini] was the only man who could have brought about the revolution of the proletariat in Italy.

Silence is the only answer you should give to the fools. Where ignorance speaks, intelligence should not give advices.

Science is now in the process of destroying religious dogma. The dogma of the divine creation is recognized as absurd.

I am making superhuman efforts to educate this people. When they have learnt to obey, they will believe what I tell them.

What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy.

War is to man what motherhood is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.

[I]t is perhaps to Mussolini's credit as a human being that his nationalism was clearly heartfelt where Stalin's was undoubtedly a mere convenience.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

If the 19th [century] 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.

…political doctrines pass, but humanity remains; and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority, a century of the Left, a century of Fascism.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 was the greatest man of our century, but he committed certain disasterous errors. I, who have the advantage of his precedent before me, shall follow in his footsteps but also avoid his errors.

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.

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.

Race? It is a feeling, not a reality. Ninety-five per cent, at least. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today.… National pride has no need of the delirium of race.

Three-fourths of 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.

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?

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.

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)

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.

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.

We deny the existence of two classes, because there are many more than two classes. We deny that human history can be explained in terms of economics. We deny your internationalism. That is a luxury article which only the elevated can practise, because peoples are passionately bound to their native soil. We affirm that the true story of capitalism is now beginning, because capitalism is not a system of oppression only, but is also a selection of values, a coordination of hierarchies, a more amply developed sense of individual responsibility.

The regime had created an imaginary Spartan country, in which all men had to make believe they were heroic soldiers, all women Roman matrons, all children Balilla (the Genoa street urchin who started a revolt against the Austrian garrison in 1746 by throwing one stone). This was done by means of slogans, flags, stirring speeches from balconies, military music, mass meetings, parades, dashing uniforms, medals, hoaxes, and constant distortions of reality. The Italians woke up too late from their artificial dream, those still alive, that is, hungry, desperate, discredited, the object of derision, cornuti e mazziati, or "cuckolded and beaten up," governed as in the past by contemptuous foreigners in a country of smoking ruins and decaying corpses, in which most things detachable had been stolen and women raped.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.