Carlo Sforza Quotes

The landed proprietors as a class are little qualified to pass judgment as to the real and the fictitious in certain social phenomena; on the other hand, they are naturally inclined to follow any conservative tendency, afraid as they are of a return of serious disorders .... The great industrialists were not thinking of combatting Bolshevism, which they knew very well did not threaten them any longer; they were up in arms against the socialist, or socializing, spirit of reform which had been gradually developing in the first twenty years of this century

Abandoned by the industrial aristocracy, abandoned by the ex-soldiers who have once more been impregnated with the ancient democratic spirit of the nation, and by the generals who had led the Italian armies to victory and who on becoming members of the Senate have voted there against the Government, Fascism finds itself supported solely by the landed proprietors and by its own militia, which constitutes the only army of a party known to modern Europe.

Certain sections of the upper classes abroad, identifying conservatism with mere material repression, are given to praising Signor Mussolini

Workers thought that the moment was ripe to take possession once [and] for all the means of production. They armed for self-defense... and began to organize production on their own.... It was the right of property abolished in fact... it was a new regime, a new form of social life that was being ushered in. And the government stood by because it felt impotent to offer opposition.

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

If you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

The triumph of fascism … serves the capitalists by crushing the working class.

The fusion of elements united solely by a faith in violence--the lack of a precise political and moral program--the fact that most of the enthusiastic rank and file of Fascism boasted of impersonating "dynamic action" and not doctrinally defined principles--all combined to create a situation in which the Fascist movement evolved quickly, and without the knowledge of the majority of its followers, into an instrument of reaction.

What the proletariat needs is a bath of blood.

We deny your internationalism, because it is a luxury which only upper classes can afford; the working people are hopelessly bound to their native shores.

Get up in one of our industrial centers today and say that two and two make four, and if there is any financial interest concerned in maintaining that two and two make five, the police will bash your head in.

God made all men, and he did not make some to crawl on hands and knees and others to ride upon their backs.

The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition.

Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth, it buys as long as it has the means to buy.

It is not right to speak of the Socialist countries (and even the Soviet Union) as if everything always went well in them … In actual fact, in all the Socialist countries, difficulties, contradictions and new problems, which must be presented to their effective reality, are arising all the time.

The workers, before all else.

The Italy of today wishes to develop her African possessions for the benefit not only of the home-land but also of the subject populations and of humanity as a whole. Where the benefits of civic organization are refused by recalcitrant natives who want to continue under the tyrannical and arbitrary rule of their petty feudal lords, Italy takes such measures to reestablish order as seem advisable in the given case. Where natural riches are wasted through backward management, she establishes a regime of scientific exploitation. Where production demands more labor than can be had locally, she creates suitable conditions for the cooperation of her sturdy colonists with the native workers. In short, Italy wishes to govern her African colonies by introducing her surplus man-power among backward populations and integrating the two, never by unnecessarily substituting the former for the latter.

In the final account, the fate of our republic will depend upon whether the masses of the peasantry will go hand in hand with the working class

Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.

The peasant has learned not to rely on assistance from without, but to walk on his own feet. Socially he is conservative. He wishes to keep his land and enjoy the fruits of his labor. For generations institutions of government were to him an outside factor, for which he cared little.

There is, in my judgment, a great future before American manufacturing, commerce and trade, which will absorb millions of additional workers. When these workers are employed at good wages, as at present, they will buy farm products in a liberal way. The proportion of the American people engaged in industrial life doubtless will continue to increase, just as it has been doing.

Contrary to the ordinary conception, the real revolution at that time [1917] was not made in the cities, but in the villages. The essential content of the Russian revolution was the tremendous, elemental process which took place among the peasants and resulted in the disruption of the landed estates, the expulsion of the landed proprietors, most of them belonging to the nobility, from their villages, and the forcible appropriation of all private and state lands by the peasants.

The longevity of the Fascist regime can well be measured by the stability and consistency of the norm which has become its central idea: that is, the negation of classes and of class struggles, even the negation of political parties, because every human being and every spiritual force in the country must be entirely subservient to the nation-state, which in its turn is interpreted exclusively by Fascism.

The nationalist right and the nebulously but fervently revolutionary left found each other once more in Fascism with its double face of conservatism and subversion.

There were the well-to-do intellectuals, pushed toward Fascism by their hostility to the working masses and by their disdain of the uncouth ways of the Socialists who, without adequate preparation, had taken possession of many municipalities and had been administering them in a manner even more ridiculous than dishonest.