Italians Quotes & Sayings

Today someone asked me if that old stereotype about hot-headed Italians is true. I answered this way: About 2,000 years ago, there was a guy running around hollering about peace & love ... and we nailed his ass to a cross! (Hope that answers your fuckin' question!) — Quentin R. Bufogle

The Italians are the most civilized people. And they're very warm. Basically, they're Jews with great architecture. — Fran Lebowitz

As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible. — Mario Batali

In my father's scheme of things, there were Italians and then there was the rest of the world. — Janet Evanovich

For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance. — Slavoj Zizek

These neighborhood was our first home as a community but, once Italians began to gain status as "full" Americans, they moved out of the communities that they co-habited with other immigrants and people of color. The rootedness in this community shifted into a dissention of difference and of privilege. In order for Italian-Americans to mark their new social location under assumed "Whiteness," they had to make a physical move away from the marginal communities of color. The discussion ended in my favor but would mark the beginning of a long struggle of unpacking the internalized oppression and discrimination that marked my family's identity of "White"-working class-Italian-Americans learning to assimilate while keeping their hyphenated identity. Learning to build bridges between my different borders and my passions has been a continual process for me. — Lachrista Greco

American Green Berets have been on the ground reaching out to some of the factions there. But don't confuse them with combat troops. So we're only talking about airstrikes now. If there are any troops that go in there it will likely be the Italians. — Tom Bowman

Berlusconi's advice to Italians trying to escape poverty: "Do it my way and earn more money". — Silvio Berlusconi

I love places that have an incredible history. I love the Italian way of life. I love the food. I love the people. I love the attitudes of Italians. — Elton John

Most correspondents came from the former colonial powers - there were British, French, and a lot of Italians, because there were a lot of Italian communities there. And of course there were a lot of Russians. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Lines were a new experience for the Italians, but they caught on quickly to this American phenomenon. — Laurie Fabiano

The Italians always made good wine, but you had the impression they were friendly guys in straw hats running family vineyards with slaves or something so that the vino was never more than ten bucks a bottle. — Joe Bob Briggs

Thank God for the Italians, the most forgiving people of the world. And they sing so loud you can barely hear the music! — Jared Leto

When in Italy, you should meet Italians. — Isa Miranda

At the outset of the creation of the euro in 1999, it was expected that the southern eurozone economies would behave like those in the north; the Italians would behave like Germans. They didn't. Instead, northern Europe fell into subsidizing southern Europe's excess consumption, that is, its current account deficits. — Alan Greenspan

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other. — Umberto Eco

Many immigrant groups have faced hostility. The Irish did in their time. Jews did. Italians did - and now, Muslim immigrants. — Tom Gjelten

When you visit a foreign city you are in it, but not of it, separated by a glass wall. Once, while a student, I was getting dressed in my ground-floor room when a family of Italians crossed the grass to watch, as if I were laid on for their amusement and instruction. — Simon Hoggart

One can rarely say enough about the kindness of Italians. One is always treated as a human being who needs unpredictable things - like a moment by oneself with a bottle on the beach. They have a true gift for what can only be called spontaneous delicacy. — Lawrence Osborne

Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn. — Victor Hugo

In return, Giovanni told me that empathizing Italians say L'ho provato sulla mia pelle, which means 'I have experienced that on my own skin.' Meaning, I have also been burned or scarred in this way, and I know exactly what you're going through. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Jeavon's thick dark hair, with its ridges of corkscrew curls, had now turned quite white, the Charlie Chaplin moustache remaining black. This combination of tones for some reason gave him an oddly Italian appearance, enhanced by blue overalls, obscurely suggesting a railway porter at a station in Italy. — Anthony Powell

To see how many Italians are going out of Italy, the sort of exodus, a great generation leaving my country, I think is the worst nightmare for me as prime minister but also for the country, of course. — Enrico Letta

And I said to myself, here's the problem with the world: The Italians are too Italian, and nobody else is Italian enough. — Mary Jo Salter

I learned that the Italians are right. It isn't what happens to us that counts. It's what we do with what happens to us that makes all the difference — Joan D. Chittister

The Italians live well. They have problems, like all countries, but they are well-dressed, the women are pretty. — Francois Pinault

Everyone always says, Does it bother you that Italians are always portrayed as Mafia characters? No, it doesn't bother me. First of all, not everybody in my family is in the Mafia. I have one uncle who's clean. — Dom Irrera

Do Italians tell you everything they feel without censor? — Adriana Trigiani

They were our enemies. Yet in those young men of Italy I'd seen something centuries old. An American is only as old as his years. A long line of something was hidden behind the bright eyes of those Italians. And then and there I decided to learn something of the modern world. There was something abroad which we Americans couldn't or wouldn't understand. But unless we made some attempt to realize that everyone in the world isn't American, and that not everything American is good, we'll all perish together, and in this twentieth century.... — John Horne Burns

The Italians have long known what makes a livable town or city. — Norman Foster

In the Bronx, you have the southern Italians; in Queens, the Greeks, Koreans and Chinese; in Brooklyn, the Jewish community; and in Harlem, the Hispanics - all with their own markets. — Daniel Boulud

Italians can never win from you, but you can lose to them.
(when asked about Ajax's chances in the 1995 Champs League final against AC Milan) — Johan Cruijff

I'm secretly a clown, or maybe it's not much of a secret! I'm a little putzo, as the Italians say - a little bit loopy. — Matthew Settle

We're delighted to have you here,' he said, putting an arm round the young man's shoulder, 'but a
word of advice. Don't try to be clever. We're all clever here. Only try to be kind, a little kind.'
Like most university stories, this one is variously attributed and it probably never even happened
but, as the Italians say, se non e vero, e ben trovato - even if it isn't true, it's well founded. — Stephen Fry

Durum semolina, golden wheat wafting in Italian fields. Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness — Haruki Murakami

Second-generation Hispanics marry non-Hispanics at a higher rate than second-generation Irish or Italians. Second-generation Hispanics' English language capability rates are higher than previous immigrant groups'. — Jeb Bush

The Americans of the United States stand in precisely the same position with regard to the peoples of South America as their fathers, the English, occupy with regard to the Italians, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and all those nations of Europe which receive their articles of daily consumption from England, because they are less advanced in civilization and trade. — Alexis De Tocqueville

No, never mind, I didn't think so. Mead, Dante's theme is man-not a man.' Lowell said finally with a mild patience that he reserved only for students. "The Italians forever twitch at Dante's sleeves trying to make him say he is of their politics and their way of thinking. Their way indeed! To confine it to Florence or Italy is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. We read Paradise Lost as a poem but Dante's Comedy as a chronicle of our inner lives. Do you boys know of Isaiah 38:10 — Matthew Pearl

But of course the Western changed along with America's view of itself, from some sort of heroic country, where everybody's free, to the spiritually fucked-up defiled place it really is, and now you got jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America's just too fucking confused, can't figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured you can escape your past, now the word is out that this is the country where you can do no such thing, this is the one place where, like the jive that finally becomes impossible to distinguish from the anti-jive, honor becomes impossible to distinguish from betrayal or just, you know, stone cold murder ... — Steve Erickson

Old St Petersburg remains a beautiful stage set but to the Russians it is not what Rome is to the Italians or Paris to the French. The decisions are made in the Kremlin. The city of Peter remains a museum, open from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. — Joseph Wechsberg

Forgotten Front." Much of the amnesia was caused by Italians who'd — Mark T. Sullivan

In the last 20, 22 years I have sung here very often and I have always felt the affection and warmth of the Italians, and I feel very close to you. — Jose Carreras

You see how Spanish, Italians, Portuguese play football. I don't say they are perfect, I say English football has a few things to learn from them in the same way they have a lot of things to learn from English football. — Jose Mourinho

Nationalism and socialism as actually lived and applied in the 20th century are the same thing (and in the 18th and 19th century, nationalism was often a force for classical liberalism!). It's all a kind of reactionary tribalism (another "ism" which becomes poisonous quickly as you up the dosage). When you nationalize an industry, you socialize it. When you socialize an industry you nationalize it. Yes, international socialism rejected this formulation. And that's why international socialism failed! People wanted to be Germans or Russians or Italians and they wanted to be socialists. Even the Soviet Union embraced national-socialism (socialism in one country) because that 'workers of the world unite' crap wouldn't fly. After Stalin, no Communist or socialist regime failed to exploit nationalism to one extent or another. — Jonah Goldberg

I love Italy. For hundreds of years, if not centuries, the people of italy (Italians) have been living here." [Audrey's insight] — Tom Gleisner

Italians in particular are seen as either benign and child-like (the sweet old nonna with her meatballs), menacing mobsters, or hyper-sexualized housewives and gigolos; the kind of nourishment I'm looking for doesn't lie in any of these stereotypes. — Christopher Castellani

The people of Texas are rightly proud of their own, just like the French and the Italians, but visiting artists have often been given a shot in the history of art. — Clifford Ross

Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another — D.H. Lawrence

Italians tend to be less rigidly moral and law-abiding than do Anglo-Saxons. They also have a profound suspicion of the state and most of its agencies. — Donna Leon

Eating local is a relatively new concept in American dining; for the Italians, it's a way of life. — Hanya Yanagihara

I am certain
you are not one of those dreary fellows one reads of who demands that
their lady friends be in possession of a maidenhead. Mine was taken
by a marrow two years ago."
"A marrow, Miss Pertwee? The vegetable that the Italians call il
zucchine?"
"The very same.A most particularly bold and impetuous hot-house
marrow. It was quite the ravishment, I can assure you."
"I consider it no dishonor at all to be preceded by so noble a vegetable. — Vinnie Tesla

I just heard some guy say Argentines are a bunch of Italians who speak Spanish but think they're British living in France. — Marc Cameron

most of its existence, Mussolini's regime had not been anti-Semitic, and early on, the Duce had explicitly criticized Hitler's racism - probably in part because Nazism did not include modern Italians in its pantheon of Aryan supermen. — Tom Reiss

Overcooked, flabby pasta or a blob of tomato ketchup was enough to incense Frank; a plate of soggy pasta in Matteo's Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, owned by his childhood buddy, Matty Jordan, had Frank storming into the kitchens. He looked around wildly, "Where are all the Italians?" he roared at the startled Filipino kitchen staff. Not content, he shot back upstairs and threw his plate of pasta against the wall. As he walked out, he dipped his finger in the tomato sauce and signed the smear: Picasso (Matty very good-naturedly put a frame around this later). — Fiona Ross

In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little sentiment beyond marbles and colors. In France, meliora probant, deteriora sequuntur
the people are too much a race of gadabouts to maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. The Chinese and most of the Eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy. The Scotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain, they are all curtains
a nation of hangmen. The Russians do not furnish. The Hottentots and Kickapoos are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous. — Edgar Allan Poe

It was possible we looked out of sorts. And of course we were aware by now that Italians don't drive bright orange cars (or bright yellow or green cars for that matter) and that the owners of such cars are looked upon with a certain amount of condescension and immediately understood to be Germans, an epithet more or less synonymous with bad taste. — Tim Parks

The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was ablaze with scarlet umbrellas. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The hand gestures of Italians are not, apparently, as clear-cut as Goethe believed. De Jorio discovered that knowing the purpose of someone's mind — Ross King

I'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters. — Martin Scorsese

Erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries - America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires. — Jess Walter

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom. — Edith Wharton

The Yankees, the first mechanicians in the world, are engineers - just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians - by right of birth. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery. — Jules Verne

His conclusion, preserved for posterity, was that the experiment of interning families of suspected nationalities - German, Japanese, Italians, and others - was a failure. Nonetheless, — Jan Jarboe Russell

The Italians have voices like peacocks - German gives me a cold in the head - and Russian is nothing but sneezing — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Americans, too many of them, take themselves too seriously. You're going to get rapped - by the viewers, by the sponsors and by the network brass - if you joke about doctors, lawyers, dentists, scientists, bus drivers, I don't care who. You can't make a joke about Catholics, Negroes, Jews, Italians, politicians, dogs or cats. In fact, politicians, dogs and cats are the most sacred institutions in America. — Johnny Carson

Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything. — Simone De Beauvoir

One way to see the constructed nature of reality is to notice how the definitions of different "races" change historically, by including groups at one time that were excluded in another. The Irish, for example, were long considered by the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of England and the United States to be members of a nonwhite "race", as were Italians, Jews, and people from a number of Eastern European countries. As such, immigrants from these groups to England and the United States were excluded and subjugated and exploited in much the same way that blacks were. — Allan G. Johnson

The culturalists tried to make the idea more appealing by pointing out that even in modern languages we use idioms that are rather imprecise about color. Don't we speak of "white wine," for instance, even if we can see perfectly well that it is really yellowish green? Don't we have "black cherries" that are dark red and "white cherries" that are yellowish red? Aren't red squirrels really brown? Don't the Italians call the yolk of an egg "red" (il rosso)? Don't we call the color of orange juice "orange," although it is in fact perfectly yellow? (Check it next time.) — Guy Deutscher

The Italians were getting so accustomed to tragedies and disasters that their appetite for sensation was becoming jaded. — Timothy Holme

Military metaphors are rarely exact, but sending Republicans against Democrats when the issue hangs in the balance is nearly always as futile as sending George B. McClellan against Robert E. Lee, the Italians against Marshal Montgomery's desert rats or an Arab armored division against an Israeli rifle company. The copy desk can write the headline before the battle begins and take the rest of the night off. — Wesley Pruden

He's in the mafia, you know."

Jan frowned. "Not everyone who's Italian is in the mafia."

"That may be true in Italy-but here there are hardly enough Italians to run a mafia. They have to belong. — Marshall Thornton

All the suits I buy have to be tailored, no matter what. But it's not just because of my height; it's because I've been skating for so long. My waist is very small, but my legs are just huge. Most really nice suit makers are Italian, and usually they make suit pants for Italian men. I'm like, 'Those Italians must have pretty skinny legs.' — Apolo Ohno

Some Italians are geniuses, but you have to find a balance. — Alain Prost

Italians are just as good as Jews when it comes to guilt. — Anita Diamant

The themes that make one laugh always stem from poverty, hunger, misery, old age, sickness, and death. These are the themes that make Italians laugh, anyway. — Mario Monicelli

Vegetables cooked for salads should always be on the crisp side, like those trays of zucchini and slender green beans and cauliflowerets in every trattoria in Venice, in the days when the Italians could eat correctly. You used to choose the things you wanted: there were tiny potatoes in their skins, remember, and artichokes boiled in olive oil, as big as your thumb, and much tenderer ... and then the waiter would throw them all into an ugly white bowl and splash a little oil and vinegar over them, and you would have a salad as fresh and tonic to your several senses as La Primavera. It can still be done, although never in the same typhoidic and enraptured air. You can still find little fresh vegetables, and still know how to cook them until they are not quite done, and chill them, and eat them in a bowl. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success — Gore Vidal

My family was all born in Sicily and I'm Italian-American. They're the real thing. They're authentic Italians, and honestly they're the most open-minded, nicest people in the world and nothing can really offend them. That's the way I think true Sicilians are. — Vinny Guadagnino

For Russians, to whom Pushkin's poem 'Eugene Onegin' is sacred text, the ballet's story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, 'Romeo' and 'Hamlet' are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante. — Robert Gottlieb

Scusi mia bella*, but it runs in the blood of all Italians to be skillful lovers. So you have to get used to this. — Olga Goa

There's a strange uniformity in the vocabulary European soccer fans use to hate black people. The same primate insults get hurled. Although they've gotten better over time, the English and Italians developed the tradition of making ape noises when black players touched the ball. The Poles toss bananas on the field. This consistency owes nothing to television, which rarely shows these finer points of fan behavior. Nor are these insults considered polite to discuss in public. This trope has simply become a continent-wide folk tradition, transmitted via the stadium, from fan to fan, from father to son. — Franklin Foer

The only reason Toronto is no longer the dullest city on earth is that it is no longer full of Anglo-Canadians. It is full of Hong Kong Chinese. And not a few Italians. — Joel Garreau

The English learned, in my view, how to use harmony much earlier than the French or the Italians, or the Germans. — Tod Machover

The authors (Habsburg military personnel) invariably show some surprise when recounting a respectable performance of a regiment during its Italian period and are forced to admit, somewhat reluctantly, that the Italians were not such bad soldiers after all. [I think this quote is hilarious, especially when imagining Tommaso's reaction.] — Lawrence Sondhaus

I can design a collection in a day and I always do, cause I've always got a load of Italians on my back, moaning that it's late. — Alexander McQueen

Italians had a "national peculiarity" to use distinctive hand gestures and body language when they spoke: a resource that was, he believed, obvious to an Italian like Leonardo when he came to paint The Last Supper. — Ross King

European nation with highest politician/lover ratio: Few European states can hope to compete with France and Italy in this department, and the two nations have been battling for European political lothario supremacy for over thirty years. The contest has been increasingly acrimonious since 1998, when France was initially the clear winner but somehow "lost" sixty-eight illicit lovers in the recount and had to concede defeat. The following year was no less rocked in scandal, when the Italians were disqualified for "stretching the boundaries" of their elected representatives to include senior civil servants - and the crown was tossed back to France. No one was quite prepared for the disgraceful scandal the following year when it was discovered that one French minister had no mistress at all and "loved his wife," a shocking revelation that led to his resignation and ultimately to the fall of the government. — Jasper Fforde

When the fountains of government [borrowing] abundance began to dry up, when through lack of funds and the impossibility of negotiating fresh loans the state was forced to check the extension of bureaucracy and to put a stop to public works, then and then only did the Italians realize what it meant to have allowed themselves to be made one of the most heavily taxed nations in the world. — John T. Flynn

I remember thinking: if the day becomes more violent, who do you blame? The English, whose behaviour on the square could be said to have been so provocative that they deserved whatever they got? The Italians, whose welcome consisted in inflicting injuries upon their visitors? Or can you place some of the blame on these men with their television equipment and their cameras, whose misrepresentative images served only to reinforce what everyone had come to expect. — Bill Buford

Italians know that what matters is style, not fashion. Italian style does not have social or age boundaries. — Stefano Gabbana

Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay. — David Mitchell

The power which the Hellenes and even the Italians possessed, of civilizing and assimilating to themselves the nations susceptible of culture with whom they came into contact, was wholly wanting in the Phoenicians. — Theodor Mommsen

Italians can not beat us, but we can certainly lose against them. — Johan Cruyff

[During the Renaissance] the Italians said, "We are one in the Father: we will go back." The Northern races said, "We are one in Christ, we will go on. — D.H. Lawrence

Everything changed, and eleven months later, here I was in the middle of the night with a gungho major, playing secret agent, hoping some Frenchie didn't put a bullet in my skull before I gave the Germans and Italians their chance. — James R. Benn

Queens, New York. The most ethnically diverse region not just in the United States, but on the entire planet ... In Queens, you will find Korean kids who sound like black kids. Italians who sound like Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans who sound like Italians. Third-generation Irish who sound like old Jews. That's Queens. Not a melting pot, not even a tossed salad, but an all-you-can-eat, mix-and-match buffet. — Victor LaValle

I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. — Victor Hugo

I am certain that most Germans have instinctive liking for Italy, just as Italians admire Germans for their many qualities. — Mario Monti

You can tell when Iraqis are getting upset because, like Italians we start talking with our hands. — Wafaa Bilal

Italy is still very much the same place it was 2,000 years ago. Italians are still the same .. there's a sense of beauty and a sense of dignity and a sense of living life to the full that infects everyone. — Bruno Heller