Oriana Fallaci

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.

I am a danger to myself if I get angry.

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.

It is the mainspring of life, courage. And courage has many faces.

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

Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.

What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It's their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.

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.

i live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant.

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

To have realized your dream makes you feel lost.

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.

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.

But here's what I've learned in this war in this country in this city: to love the miracle of having been born.