Michael Portillo Quotes

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

German militarism and Nazism have devastated twice in our generation the lands of German neighbors.

If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.

Set Europe ablaze!

Fascism means war.

All the convents in Madrid are not worth the life of a single Republican.

Fascism is the cult of organised murder , invented by the arch-enemies of society . It tends to destroy civilization and revert man to his most barbarous state. Mussolini and Hitler might well be called the devils of an age, for they are playing hell with civilization.

The dirty truth is that many people find fascism to be not particularly horrible.

There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it.

In some states militant nationalism has gone to the lengths of dictatorship, the cult of the absolute or totalitarian state and the glorification of war.

There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.

With bombs and fires, you get only one mistake.

The town caught fire in several places, shells crashed and burst, and solid shot rained like hail.

I was handed a chocolate bar and an M-1 rifle and told to go kill Hitler.

Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

I've always been very interested in political violence. When I finished high school, I did a small dissertation about political violence and fascism in Italy.

But it is neither cannon nor bayonet that will do the worst damage to this city. No, this place will remember the war against our government just as long as there are inhabitants here.

It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.

Fascism is not the result of dictatorship.

I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses.

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

To declare the Cold War over, and declare democracy has won out over totalitarianism, is a measure of arrogance and wrong-headedness.

The International Brigades and the British volunteers were, numerically, only a small part of the Republican forces, but nearly all had accepted the need for organization and order in civilian life.