Aphorisms on Italy, quotes and quotations about Italy and the Italian people, its culture, virtues and vices, part 3, by different and famous international author.
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I realised I’d been spoiled at Liverpool. We were used to winning. In Italy I grew up as a person. I didn’t enjoy the football, mind. It was very defensive, but I became a better player because of the work I had to do around the box. Off the pitch, I learned about what to eat and what to drink to be successful, and I learned about life.
Ian Rush
The most stylish country in the world is Italy.
Nick Rhodes
In Italy there are about 60 million people and we know how high is the percentage of morons on national soil. However, in China there are about 1.4 billion people and in India almost 1.3 billion. Therefore I wonder then, if more or less all the world is a small village, with how many morons should we have to come to terms on the territory of this stupid planet.
Carl William Brown
Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.
Bertrand Russell
You have to remember that Italy is second to none, in fact, if Germany has more than 3,500 brothels, Italy has the Vatican!
Carl William Brown
Appeal to all scholars of stupidity in the world. Come to Italy, this country has the highest rate of morons of the universe, especially among political, bureaucratic, judicial, religious, intellectual, artistic, and mass media members, so it is the best place to develop your own field research.
Carl William Brown
To be a true philosopher you must study stupidity a lot, that’s why, as Doctor Samuel Johnson used to say, a man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.
Carl William Brown
Italy is one of the world leading country of bureaucracy and stupidity.
Carl William Brown
In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles
The ideological mix-up is a natural, exasperating and, at the same time, endearing feature in this country of fierce individualists. There are seventy-five political parties in Italy – although not all are represented in parliament. Most of these parties are very small but even the smallest can boast of a sharp and unbridgeable ideological split. There is a party which has only one single member. He is schizophrenic.
George Mikes
Since Italy is the land of bureaucratic and political nonsense, it tries to make up for the lost chances through a complex system of confused laws and logical stupidity.
Carl William Brown
The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom.
Oriana Fallaci
Italy is doomed to disappear, it is too stupid to survive!
Carl William Brown
The most hypocritical, bootlicking, obsequious, slavelike, submissive, unfree journalists in Europe, this is Italy.
Carl William Brown
The Italians may be clever and quick-witted but they are not intellectuals. They lack wanderlust, indeed, most of them lack intellectual curiosity in every shape and form.
George Mikes
In Italy there are a lot of illegal things, since the law is illegal too.
Carl William Brown
Prices in Italy are only slightly lower than in France, which means that Italy is a very expensive country for everyone, natives, visitors and tourists.
George Mikes
Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.
Carl William Brown
The main characteristic of English conversation is that no one ever speaks; of Italian that everyone speaks at the same time. One iron law reigns supreme in Italian conversation: the survival of the loudest.
George Mikes
In Italy we have not a Common law legal system, we have a stupid one instead!
Carl William Brown
Hotel bills are scrupulously honest all over Italy… The only case which puzzled me occured in Naples. I wondered whether they were justified in adding 230 lire for heating to my bill in early June.
George Mikes
The Cathedral of this ancient and beautiful city of ……….* is of particular interest. It is the third largest Cathedral in Italy. It is a magnificent Gothic building (not pure Gothic but pure enough for the vast majority of tourists). The Italians, in their outlandish way, like to refer to the Cathedral as Il Duomo. * Fill in the name of the city with pencil. Rub it afterwards.
George Mikes
In Italy there are many illegal things, but stupidity is the most legal of all.
Carl William Brown
Italians intellectuals are few and far between. This is not a derogatory statement; nor is it a praise… Italy can boast of a number of intellectuals – brilliant and witty. But their number is small – much smaller than in France, England or Germany. The Italians, as a nation, do not read much. Observe a rush hour crowd in London or New York on the one hand and in Rome on the other. In London and New York one person in ten will be without a paper; in Rome one in ten will have a paper. The Italians will watch the women in the bus or tram, the crowd in the street or the passing shop-windows but they do not read.
George Mikes
The stupidest and most corrupted, dangerous, useless, incompetent, unfit and inefficient politicians in Europe: this is Italy.
Carl William Brown
The role of Italy and of Austria has diminished as has that of France and Britain; Germany and Japan have suffered catastrophically.
Emily Greene Balch
You’re a Catholic in Italy when you’re born, it’s unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.
Andrew Greeley
Venice, Italy, survives 365 days out of every year in water; New Orleans can survive a few days of water if it has to.
Billy Tauzin
I live in Italy part time, and they’re obsessed with what’s happening in LA too. They make fun of Americans, but the world wants to know what’s going on in Hollywood.
Debi Mazar
After about the first Millennium, Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture, which spread throughout Europe, much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration.
Harry Seidler
Italy has piled up huge public debt because the successive governments were too close to the life of ordinary citizens, too willing to please the requests of everybody, thereby acting against the interests of future generations.
Mario Monti
I think I feel automatically at home in Italy.
Boyd Rice
Even when it comes to zippers and buttons, Italy reigns supreme. The luxury market is ours, as demonstrated by the voracity with which various foreign conglomerates are buying up the jewels of our manufacturing sector.
Lapo Elkann
We seem to be a long way off from the kind of Fascism which we behold in Italy today, but we are not so far from the kind of Fascism which Mussolini preached in Italy before he assumed power, and we are slowly approaching the conditions which made Fascism there possible.
John T. Flynn
The most hypocritical, bootlicking, obsequious, slavelike, submissive, unfree journalists in Europe, this is Italy.
Carl William Brown
I want to retire very early, by the time I am 40, and go to live in Italy.
Louise Mensch
Kosovo is too close to Europe. It is not only close to Albania, it is close to Greece, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, where there are still many Kosovo refugees. Spontaneous reactions could multiply.
Fatos Nano
Dante himself is open to the suspicion of partiality: it is said, not without apparent ground, that he puts into hell all the enemies of the political cause, which, in his eyes, was that of Italy and God.
Goldwin Smith
Italy and Spain really are not my countries.
Ruud van Nistelrooy
La Scala is easily one of the top 10 symbols of Italy’s cultural excellence. That makes it vital to our global image. Closing it would send a message to the rest of the world that Italy doesn’t care.
Diego Della Valle
On weekends, the U.S. was casual; in Italy the weekend was very formal. I came to understand that weekends are about free time, and that one could wear high quality, tasteful products that weren’t so formal.
Diego Della Valle
The stupidest and most corrupted, dangerous, useless, incompetent, unfit and inefficient politicians in Europe: this is Italy.
Carl William Brown
It’s easy to understand why the most beautiful poems about England in the spring were written by poets living in Italy at the time.
Philip Dunne
My talk show takes place in bed, in Italy.
Amanda Lear
There was interest from clubs in Italy and England, I believe. But I’ve never been attracted by the way they play in Italy. Staying in Spain was always my preference.
Luis Figo
When I was a kid, we lived in Italy, which isn’t really known for figure skating. I think that’s why I excelled so well. I spent a lot of my high school years training.
Meta Golding
In 1917 – as we have seen, – Italy suffered a great reverse, losing 200,000 soldiers and immense supplies.
Kelly Miller
I like France quite a lot, and I like Italy.
Bonnie Wright
Italy in the first years got food, for the first year or the first periods got food. Then we got raw materials and then we got tool machines, let’s say, instruments for working.
Gianni Agnelli
I am quite international. My background, born in Turkey. My family is a Jewish family from Iran, so I went from Turkey to Iran to Israel, and then grew up in Italy and ended up in U.S. for graduate school. So I tend to look at things from an international perspective, and I think that gives you a little bit of a broader view of what’s going on.
Nouriel Roubini
I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew up in Italy and had a humanistic education in philosophy and literature – things I love and appreciate. People are richer and more complex than just their day-to-day professional pursuits might suggest.
Nouriel Roubini
Modeling, for me, was not fulfilling. I didn’t see the point – although I was able to travel a great deal. I lived in Italy, Germany, and Spain, but I wasn’t devoted to it.
Tom Welling
The first condition of success for the League of Nations is, therefore, a firm understanding between the British Empire and the United States of America and France and Italy that there will be no competitive building up of fleets or armies between them.
Arthur Henderson
I have a lot of brothers and sisters, and each movie has helped pay for tuition. And then I was like, I only have one left in college, so why am I doing this? But now I want to go back to Italy and live on a farm in Tuscany.
Rose McGowan
But we did the Pink Panther not in Hollywood, in Italy.
Claudia Cardinale
We realized that Elite has the potential to really add value to a company like La Perla, due to its relationship to the fashion business, links to music, to entertainment, all of this tends to point more and more to the luxury consumer. The fashion world is one where Italy has clear excellence. I see the potential with it very clearly.
Silvio Scaglia
I think we have a good team, but soccer fans will know that we’re in a really tough group. The three teams in our group are
really strong. The Czech Republic is a very good team, Italy is traditionally a powerhouse, and Ghana is one of the best teams in Africa.
Claudio Reyna
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.
Loretta Napoleoni
Like Venice, Italy, New Orleans is a cultural treasure. And everyone who lived in the city should be allowed to come back. But that doesn’t mean that they all should live in exactly the same spot that they lived before.
Ed McMahon
When they were small and my wife really had no other responsibilities, except taking care of the family and all of us, it wasn’t that big a deal. It was fun. Hey, we’re going to Moscow. We’re going to Italy. We’re going to Toronto. We’re going to New York.
Joe Mantegna
The open ear of youth doth always listen; report of fashions in proud Italy, whose manners still our tardy apish nation limps after in base imitation.
William Shakespeare
To Italy; and there, at Venice, gave his body to that pleasant country’s earth, and his pure soul unto his captain, Christ, under whose colours he had fought so long.
William Shakespeare
I’ve done a road trip across Italy with a girlfriend, and that was very romantic. I think that road trips are probably one of the romantic things you can do. To take your girlfriend and just stay wherever; don’t have a destination and just drive and see where the road takes you is pretty cool.
Christopher Egan
I was playing the best football of my career at the time, finishing top scorer in Italy three year’s running. There were other good players around but I think I was the best at that time.
Michel Platini
It is important to remember that some of the most serious thinkers once thought that democracy was not compatible with the cultures of Germany, Italy, Japan, Latin America and Russia.
Natan Sharansky
Italy is definitely where I feel most at home, or alternatively, living in total wilderness, in the bush in Australia.
Noah Taylor
The Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy, and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union.
Giovanni Agnelli
Well, in 1947… in Europe and in Italy especially, we thought of America as all-powerful.
Giovanni Agnelli
In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything – from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up – grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.
Renzo Piano
The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators – I don’t know whether that’s a coincidence, or if there’s something to be learned from it.
Jonathan Coe
If you’re a Kennedy and you go to Italy or you go to Argentina, you’re treated as royalty. And in the United States, we’re endlessly fascinated by the family.
Douglas Brinkley
I like health-conscious cooking, but growing up in the South, I do love southern cooking; southern France, southern Italy, southern Spain. I love southern cooking.
Clarence Clemons
But Italy can only have any real influence on world affairs if it carries weight in Europe.
Romano Prodi
Italy is divided between us and them, rich and poor, north and south, young and old, employed and unemployed.
Romano Prodi
Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts.
Gordon Sinclair
Hollywood cools, and when it cools you have to go to where the work is. I ran off to Italy to do spaghetti westerns.
Tab Hunter
I was a star in Italy, Australia, Germany and Japan before the American stations ever paid attention at all.
Nancy Sinatra
In Italy, they add work and life on to food and wine.
Robin Leach
And since Italy was involved in the space station as well as signed an agreement with NASA. And when the possibility to enter the 1996 Mission Specialist class.
Umberto Guidoni
Political parties in Italy are so stupid and expensive that they deserve to be abolished.
Carl William Brown
I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.
Emperor Charles V
It was pretty awful for us children because we never really knew the local children. Mother was keen for us to learn languages, so our travels took us to France and Italy, as well as the West Country.
Mary Wesley
During my first month in Italy I lived a nomadic life.
Hugh Dalton
Moving from Wales to Italy is like moving to a different country.
Ian Rush
Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn’t an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema.
Andrzej Wajda
Tranio, since for the great desire I had to see fair Padua, nursery of arts, I am arriv’d for fruitful Lombardy, the pleasant garden of great Italy.
William Shakespeare
We are the last remaining country to allow ourselves two breaks in the season. You just have to look at England, Italy and Spain, they play right through the season. We on the other hand take six weeks off in the winter until the end of January, and that is a luxury.
Franz Beckenbauer
Hollywood is a wonderful machine for making big movies. In France, we make smaller and more personal films, but if things keep changing, this will disappear. The industry in Italy is practically gone. Cinecittà now is used mostly by filmmakers from others places, like Martin Scorsese.
Ludivine Sagnier
I like people like Robert De Niro and Anthony Hopkins. And Gianfranco Zola, who played for Chelsea and Italy. He’s an artist with his feet.
Phil Daniels
In Spain and Italy I would not have a life among the fans. Everyone wants to touch you, own you and approach you. I try to be as kind as possible to all my fans, but in those countries I could not do it. There they ask too much from you.
Ruud van Nistelrooy
Having achieved such signal successes in the east, Russia and Roumania being both disposed of, the German leaders planned a campaign designed to crush Italy.
Kelly Miller
Well, Italy had been overrun by the War, there had practically been civil war, north and south of the Gothic Line, heavy bombing, the northern industrial cities had been bombed heavily and we had political disorder before 1948.
Gianni Agnelli
Well, the Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside Soviet Union, there’s no doubt about that.
Gianni Agnelli
I just wanted to get back to playing attacking football after my time in Italy. It was a little difficult at first but the atmosphere and the fans were just fantastic.
Dennis Bergkamp
In Holland and Spain and France, where so many of us come from, people aren’t interested in the sex lives of their players. We don’t hear these stories – even in Italy where the media is right on top of football.
Dennis Bergkamp
I started this whole endeavor really. And at the beginning we had the selection in Italy. And that was pretty much among people that had held previous experience in that particular satellite. So, I was in that, in a good position then.
Umberto Guidoni
I haven’t had that good a time in ages. Since September 11, really. I just felt so happy, it was like the sun came out of the clouds for me. I love Italy.
Bruce Sterling
I have been going to Italy since 1980, but I always went to do work. I did not live overseas, because I do not like running around with everything I own in a paper bag.
Bill Dixon
Italy have plenty of high-quality players. Newcomers need time to get adjusted to the set-up and the system of play. I’m very young, and although I think I have shown good quality in my international games, I realise that there are plenty of others competing for places.
Alessandro Del Piero
Years ago when DNA was going on, I produced a record in Italy but I didn’t think I’d do another one.
Arto Lindsay
Recently, I was in Bernalda, my dad’s ancestral home town in Italy. He has just refurbished a palazzo and turned it into a hotel, so we had my sister’s wedding there. It was beautiful.
Roman Coppola
It was my proudest moment as a manager when England drew 0-0 with Italy in Rome to qualify for the World Cup finals. Fifteen years later, the stakes are equally high for both countries as they go head-to-head for a semi-final place at the European Championship.
Glenn Hoddle
At the very beginning of my career, when I opened my business in Italy, I was also a ranked tennis player. I had won many tournaments. To be an athlete was my first choice. Second choice: designer. However! There was more money in being a designer at that time.
Oleg Cassini
For many years I enjoyed the pleasure of cruising on my yacht all summer long and these were my best holidays. In mid-May, we’d start in St Tropez. I’d collect my bikinis from my home there and then we’d go up to Cannes for the Film Festival, on to Monte Carlo for the Grand Prix and then to Italy.
Ivana Trump
Going to Europe as a budding cook opened my eyes to food in a different way. When I got to Italy, the first thing I did was put my little basil plants in the ground and watch them turn into big, healthy bushes.
Frances Mayes
I find that other countries have this or this, but Italy is the only one that has it all for me. The culture, the cuisine, the people, the landscape, the history. Just everything to me comes together there.
Frances Mayes
I’m working on Leno. He’s from my home state, Massachusetts. And my home country, Italy. I said, ‘Hey, Jay, why don’t you have me on your show? Afraid I’ll be funnier than you?’
Joe Arpaio
People think being Elvira is a lot of fun – and it is – but I was doing a lot more bizarre stuff before then, just being a dancer and a showgirl and traveling around Italy in a band and working for Playboy Club, and later being a model and meeting a million and one people and being kind of a groupie… It’s all been really interesting.
Cassandra Peterson
I will say that the food in both Japan and Italy was immaculate. I don’t remember having bad food in either country.
Daniel Gillies
I absolutely refuse to accept the fact that any country in the world goes into a kind of film-making crisis. What happens is they lose confidence, they lose focus and the young film-makers of any particular generation can very easily get lost in that mix. It’s happened in Italy, happened in France, happened in the U.K. during my lifetime.
David Puttnam
Broke my femur on a cruise with my wife in Italy. I’d walked back to my cabin after dinner with half a plate of spaghetti when I leaned in to open the door. Turns out it was already open, so I fell flat on my face like something from the Keystone Kops.
Art Donovan
I was offered a free villa in Hollywood, but I said no thank you, I prefer to live in Italy.
Ennio Morricone
I am not a newcomer, you know, so I want to be judged for what I did when I was prime minister last time in Italy and president of the European Commission for more than five years.
Romano Prodi
The problem of Italy is not really a question of age. Japan has an older population, and it is now in full economic recovery. The problem is that Italy is old in the structure of the society.
Romano Prodi
The story is extant, and writ in very choice Italian.
William Shakespeare
The Italians will laugh at me; every time Hitler occupies a country he sends me a message.
Benito Mussolini
When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well.
Marcel Carne
You don’t become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.
Kenneth Rexroth
Wasting time is something that people do or feel all over the world, not just in Italy.
Paolo Sorrentino
Acting is wonderful, but it’s not pulling in the type of money that I want. It’s not bringing in the type of money that I am used to or the type of money that is going to supply my lifestyle. I’m a leisure girl; I like to be over in Italy or in Europe, you know shopping or vacationing, you know.
LisaRaye McCoy-Misick
One needs a comprehensive concept that decides just how much debt states like Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy can sustainably bear.
Peter Bofinger
I took time off from school and traveled to Italy when I was 19, living with my extended family members. I must have slept in 30 different houses those months, taken in by people who’d never even met me.
Christina Perri
The American movie, in part because America’s a melting pot, the cultural hodgepodge that America makes, generates movies that have appeal across all international boundaries. And that’s really not true for most domestic film industries. It’s no longer true of France and Italy, less true than it used to be of the U.K.
Howard Stringer
I directed a piece of theater in Italy. We took nine fables from the town and we created a play.
Vincent Schiavelli
Gladio had been necessary during the days of the Cold War but, in view of the collapse of the East Block, Italy would suggest to Nato that the organisation was no longer necessary.
Giulio Andreotti
It’s typical of Italian culture that we only start to feel emotional about something when we have the possibility to see it in front of us. By February, Italy will have Olympic fever.
Alberto Tomba
I often make movies that involve depression or deep holes of sadness, although there are also these other great things in ‘New Moon,’ like this epic set-piece at the end of the film in Italy.
Chris Weitz
Appeal to all scholars of stupidity in the world. Come to Italy, this country has the highest rate of morons of the universe, especially among political, bureaucratic, judicial, religious, intellectual, artistic, and mass media members, so it is the best place to develop your own field research.
Carl William Brown
Italy has great food and Barcelona has great energy.
Stefon Harris
I am proof that you can you make money in Italy and be honest.
Leonardo Del Vecchio
I think at the end of the day, the real sick man of Europe is liable to turn out to be France, not Greece, not Portugal, not Spain, not Italy. The reason is France is very uncompetitive to begin with on a global scale, and the measures that Hollande has been putting in have been very, very negative from the point of view of economic growth.
Wilbur Ross
I’ve been influenced by some of the greatest designers. Charles Eames. And Bruno Munari in the ’50s in Italy – when they had to retool the industry of war into an industry to help society. In a way, I’m influenced by designers that were there at a radical time of change.
Yves Behar
Opera in English, is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H.L. Mencken
Heaven is where: the police are British; the cooks are French; the engineers are German; the administrators are Swiss, and the lovers are Italian.
Anonymous
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English speaking audiences.
Edith Wharton
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