Benito Mussolini: State

Benito Mussolini was Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequent Republican Fascist Party. Explore interesting quotes on state.

Benito Mussolini: 254 quotes38 likes

“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Benito Mussolini

Speech to Chamber of Deputies (9 December 1928), quoted in Propaganda and Dictatorship (2007) by Marx Fritz Morstein, p. 48
1920s

“The Fascist State directs and controls the entrepreneurs, whether it be in our fisheries or in our heavy industry in the Val d'Aosta. There the State actually owns the mines and carries on transport, for the railways are state property. So are many of the factories… We term it state intervention… If anything fails to work properly, the State intervenes. The capitalists will go on doing what they are told, down to the very end. They have no option and cannot put up any fight. Capital is not God; it is only a means to an end.”

Benito Mussolini

As quoted in Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933), pp. 153-154, Interview took place between March 23 and April 4, 1932
1930s

“Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State.... It is opposed to classical Liberalism.... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual.”

Benito Mussolini book The Doctrine of Fascism

"The Doctrine of Fascism" Firenze: Vallecchi Editore (1935 version), p. 13
1930s

“State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.”

Benito Mussolini

Quoted from “The Labor Charter: The Corporate State and its Organization”, promulgated by Mussolini's Grand Council of Fascism, Article 9, (April 21, 1927) Copy found in Mediterranean Fascism 1919-1945, Charles F. Delzell, The MacMillan Press, (1971) p. 122. Also in Benito Mussolini’s “Doctrine of Fascism”, published as “Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions” (1935), Rome: Ardita Publishers, p.135-136.
1920s

“Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.”

Benito Mussolini

“The Doctrine of Fascism” (1935 version), Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, p. 15
1930s

“The struggle between the two worlds [Fascism and Democracy] can permit no compromises. The new cycle which begins with the ninth year of the Fascist regime places the alternative in even greater relief — either we or they, either their ideas or ours, either our State or theirs!”

Benito Mussolini

"Fundamentals of critical argumentation" (2005) by Douglas Walton, p. 243
Undated

“Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State.”

Benito Mussolini book The Doctrine of Fascism

"The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932), quoted in The New York Times (11 January 1935)
1930s

“Three-fourths of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state. And if I dare to introduce to Italy state capitalism or state socialism, which is the reverse side of the medal, I will have the necessary subjective and objective conditions to do it.”

Benito Mussolini

The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification, by Gianni Toniolo, editor, Oxford University Press (2013) p. 59. Mussolini’s speech to the Chamber of Deputies on May 26, 1934.
1930s

“The Fascist State has never tried to create its own God, as at one moment Robespierre and the wildest extremists of the Convention tried to do; nor does it vainly seek to obliterate religion from the hearts of men as does Bolshevism: Fascism respects the God of the ascetics, of the saints, of the heroes, and also God as seen and prayed to by the simple and primitive heart of the people.”

Benito Mussolini book The Doctrine of Fascism

The Doctrine of Fascism, June 1932. Quoted in Charles Floyd Delzell, Mediterranean Fascism, 1919-45 Springer, 1971
1930s

“War is the normal state of the people.”

Benito Mussolini

"Duce (1922-42)" in TIME magazine (August 2, 1943)
1940s

“If the 19th [century] was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state.”

Benito Mussolini book The Doctrine of Fascism

"The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932)
1930s

“Comrade Tassinari was right in stating that for a revolution to be great, for it to make a deep impression on the life of the people and on history, it must be a social revolution.”

Benito Mussolini

Speech to the National Corporative Council (November 14, 1933), in A Primer of Italian Fascism, edited/translated by Jeffrey T. Schnapp (2000) p.163.
1930s

“To-morrow, Fascists and communists, both persecuted by the police, may arrive at an agreement, sinking their differences until the time comes to share the spoils. I realise that though there are no political affinities between us, there are plenty of intellectual affinities. Like them, we believe in the necessity for a centralised and unitary state, imposing an iron discipline on everyone, but with the difference that they reach this conclusion through the idea of class, we through the idea of the nation.”

Benito Mussolini

As quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution, Jacob Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 494, Mussolini's declaration near the end of 1921
1920s

“Fascism was not the protector of any one class, but a supreme regulator of the relations between all citizens of a state.”

Benito Mussolini book My Autobiography

My Autobiography , New York: NY, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1928) p. 280
1920s

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

Benito Mussolini

This quote spread rapidly in the United States after appearing in a column by Molly Ivins (24 November 2002). It is repeated often and sometimes attributed to the "Fascism" entry in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana. However hard copies of the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana exist in numerous libraries and the alleged quote is not in the text, nor is there anything that would support the alleged quote. A vaguely similar statement does appear in Doctrine of Fascism. <br class="br">We are, in other words, a state which controls all forces acting in nature. We control political forces, we control moral forces, we control economic forces, therefore we are a full-blown Corporative state. <br class="br">The same document explains that the "corporations" (corporazioni) on which the Fascist state rested were its own creations, modeled on guild associations and not private companies, which Italian normally calls società. For details see "Mussolini on the Corporate State" http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/corporatism.html by Chip Berlet. <br class="br">Attributed

“Yet the Fascist State is unique, and an original creation. It is not reactionary, but revolutionary, in that it anticipates the solution of the universal political problems which elsewhere have to be settled in the political field by the rivalry of parties, the excessive power of the Parliamentary regime and the irresponsibility of political assemblies.”

Benito Mussolini

As quoted in “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism”, Jane Soames translator, Hogarth Press, London, authorized edition (1933) p. 23
1930s

“The citizen in the Fascist State is no longer a selfish individual who has the anti-social right of rebelling against any law of the Collectivity.”

Benito Mussolini

My Autobiography by Mussolini, New York: NY, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1928) p. 280.
1920s