Top 70 Oriana Fallaci Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Journalism combines adventure with culture.”

— Oriana Fallaci

Featured in: Adventure Quotes

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

— Oriana Fallaci

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

— Oriana Fallaci

4. “Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense.”

— Oriana Fallaci

5. “Physical courage is a great test.”

— Oriana Fallaci

6. “To have realized your dream makes you feel lost.”

— Oriana Fallaci

7. “There are three points of view to everything – mine, yours, and the truth.”

— Oriana Fallaci

8. “You cannot survive if you do not know the past.”

— Oriana Fallaci

9. “La Vita ha 4 sensi: Amare, soffrire, lottare e Vincere. Chi ama soffre. Chi soffre lotta. Chi lotta vince. Ama molto, soffri poco, lotta tanto, VINCI SEMPRE.”

— Oriana Fallaci

10. “Listening to someone talk isn’t at all like listening to their words played over on a machine. What you hear when you have a face before you is never what you hear when you have before you a winding tape.”

— Oriana Fallaci

11. “There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape.”

— Oriana Fallaci

12. “I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion.”

— Oriana Fallaci

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

— Oriana Fallaci

14. “Arafat contradicts himself every five minutes. He always plays the double-cross, lies even if you ask him what time it is.”

— Oriana Fallaci

15. “Sometimes the dead are more alive than the living. And they can kill the living.”

— Oriana Fallaci

16. “Life is such an effort, Child. It’s a war that is renewed each day, and its moments of joy are brief parentheses for which you pay a cruel price.”

— Oriana Fallaci

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

— Oriana Fallaci

18. “Khomeini was not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king – a real leader.”

— Oriana Fallaci

19. “This Islam business kidnapped me.”

— Oriana Fallaci

20. “What’s the point anyway – Of suffering, dying? It teaches us to live, boy. A man who does not struggle does not live, he survives.”

— Oriana Fallaci

21. “Objectivity does not exist. The word is a hypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: Sometimes truth stays on one side only.”

— Oriana Fallaci

22. “The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.”

— Oriana Fallaci

23. “If a man is a man and not a sheep in the flock, he has a survival instinct in him that leads him to fight even if he realizes he’s fighting in vain, even if he knows he will lose...”

— Oriana Fallaci

24. “Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?”

— Oriana Fallaci

25. “Love isn’t putting chain on someone who wants to struggle and is ready to die for it, love is letting him die in the way he’s chosen.”

— Oriana Fallaci

26. “I don’t even know if I will be around next year. My cancers are so bad that I think I’ve arrived at the end of the road. What a pity. I would like to live not only because I love life so much, but because I’d like to see the result of the trial. I do think I will be found guilty.”

— Oriana Fallaci

27. “To be good or bad doesn’t count: life out in this world doesn’t depend on that. It depends on a relation of forces based on violence. And survival is violence. You’ll wear leather shoes because someone has killed a cow and skinned it to make leather.”

— Oriana Fallaci

28. “War is something Arafat sends others to do for him. That is, the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent caused the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Clinton’s mediation.”

— Oriana Fallaci

29. “I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.”

— Oriana Fallaci

30. “I have reached the conclusion that those who have physical courage also have moral courage. Physical courage is a great test.”

— Oriana Fallaci

31. “Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon.”

— Oriana Fallaci

32. “I always introduce myself as an encyclopedia of defects which I do not deny. Why should I? It took me a whole life to build myself as I am.”

— Oriana Fallaci

33. “I find it shameful that in nearly all the universities of Europe, Palestinian students sponsor and nurture anti-Semitism.”

— Oriana Fallaci

34. “Have you ever thought that war is a madhouse and that everyone in the war is a patient?”

— Oriana Fallaci

35. “I am a danger to myself if I get angry.”

— Oriana Fallaci

36. “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.”

— Oriana Fallaci

37. “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.”

— Oriana Fallaci

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

— Oriana Fallaci

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

— Oriana Fallaci

40. “You wear yourself out in the pursuit of wealth or love or freedom, you do everything to gain some right, and once it’s gained you take no pleasure in it.”

— Oriana Fallaci

41. “I have never met a man more shy than Clark Gable. He was so shy, you couldn’t make him talk.”

— Oriana Fallaci

42. “Instead of learned young people we have donkeys with University degrees. Instead of future leaders we have mollusks with expensive blue jeans and phony revolutionaries with ski masks. And do you know what? Maybe this is another reason why our Moslem invaders have such an easy game.”

— Oriana Fallaci

43. “I didn’t want to kill a man. I’m not capable of killing a man. I wanted to kill a tyrant.”

— Oriana Fallaci

44. “I leave shreds of my soul on every experience.”

— Oriana Fallaci

45. “With our progress we have destroyed our only weapon against tedium: that rare weakness we call imagination.”

— Oriana Fallaci

46. “But here’s what I’ve learned in this war, in this country, in this city: to love the miracle of having been born.”

— Oriana Fallaci

47. “The more democratic and open a society is, the more it’s exposed to terrorism. The more a country is free, not governed by a police regime, the more it risks hijackings or massacres like the ones that took place for many years in Italy and Germany and other parts of Europe.”

— Oriana Fallaci

48. “One day you and I will have to have a little talk about this business called love. I still don’t understand what it’s all about. My guess is that it’s just a gigantic hoax, invented to keep people quiet and diverted. Everyone talks about love: the priests, the advertising posters, the literati, and the politicians, those of them who make love. And in speaking of love and offering it as a panacea for every tragedy, they would and betray and kill both body and soul.”

— Oriana Fallaci

49. “Io perfino nelle pause in cui piango suoi miei fallimenti, le mie delusioni, i miei strazi, concludo che soffrire sia da preferirsi al niente.”

— Oriana Fallaci

50. “I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.”

— Oriana Fallaci