Indro Montanelli

"Pertini has interpreted as their best the worst about Italians."

"We Italians owe something to Elvis Presley: its one of the rare occasions when we prefer to be Italian rather than American."

"The American death penalty exists and resists in America because it was a basic and constitutive element of its birth and development. Of the famous 102 Pilgrims who first landed from the Mayflower on that Continent not to plunder as the Spaniards and Portuguese did in Mexico and in South America, but to build you a new and free society, about two thirds were convicts escaping Justice and the jails of Europe, and a third were men that sought freedom and above all religious freedom. The former had a pistol in their pocket, the latter the Bible, but in its Calvinist version of the law of retaliation, based on the idea of an executioner God that demands death of those who deliver it without just cause."

"I know many crooks and they never preach, but I dont know anyone who preaches that isnt a crook also."

"Gladio had been established in almost all of the countries that belonged to Nato. And by Natos will, aware that its European partners could not have withstood the attack of a super-armed Soviet Union, they would have had to wait an American intervention for a comeback. Its demonstrated by the fact that when this plan was revealed, no other country found much to say about it. Only we Italians – the usual idiot novelists and perhaps something worse than idiots – made it the subject of scandal and a pretext of «Crime fictions» that still find credit, as your letter shows. I also feel shocked, and bit offended. But only because no one has asked me to join Gladio: I would have done it with enthusiasm."

"Let not the usual abstract arguments be brought to me, like the sacredness of life: no one contests the right of everyone to arrange their own life, I dont see why their own death has to be contested."