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Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born 18 November 1939) is a Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic.

Quotes

 * "Well, maybe I'm a latent homosexual." He considered that for a moment. "Or maybe I'm a latent heterosexual. Anyway, I'm pretty latent. I don't know why. Of course, I've taken a number of stabs at it, but then I start thinking about the futility of it all and I give up. Maybe it's because you're expected to do something and after a certain point all I want to do is lie there and stare at the ceiling."
 * The Edible Woman (1969)

 * The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
 * Surfacing (1972) p. 107
 * Variant: The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
 * The premise for this quote is now known to be a linguistic myth stemming from the early 20th century work of Franz Boas. This quote by Atwood has been cited as an example of the perpetuation of this myth.
 * Note: The word "Eskimo" has come to be considered offensive, especially in Canada. The term is still used worldwide by historians and archaeologists. Source: Wikiquote.

 * A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there’s less of you.
 * Time magazine (19 March 1973)

 * I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
 * Lady Oracle (1976)

 * He's just a contact of hers, which is not the same as a friend. While she was in the hospital she decided that most of her friends were really just contacts.
 * Bodily Harm (1981)

 * He had that faint sick look in his eyes, as if he wanted to give her something, charity for instance.
 * Bodily Harm (1981)

 * The policemen's faces glisten too, they're holding themselves back, they love this, it's a ceremony, they're implementing a policy.
 * Bodily Harm (1981)

 * "Why do men feel threatened by women?" I asked a male friend of mine. (I love that wonderful rhetorical device, "a male friend of mine." It's often used by female journalists when they want to say something particularly bitchy but don't want to be held responsible for it themselves. It also lets people know that you do have male friends, that you aren't one of those fire-breathing mythical monsters, The Radical Feminists, who walk around with little pairs of scissors and kick men in the shins if they open doors for you. "A male friend of mine" also gives — let us admit it — a certain weight to the opinions expressed.) So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. "I mean," I said, "men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power." "They're afraid women will laugh at them," he said. "Undercut their world view." Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, "Why do women feel threatened by men?" "They're afraid of being killed," they said.
 * Writing the Male Character, a Hagey Lecture at the University of Waterloo (9 February 1982); reprinted in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (1982), p. 413. Paraphrases of such expressions have provided them wider exposure; Gavin De Becker later stated in The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence (1997) "It is understandable that the perspectives of men and women on safety are so different — men and women live in different worlds. I don’t remember where I first heard this simple description of one dramatic contrast between the genders, but it is strikingly accurate: At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them."

 * Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
 * Cat's Eye (1988)

 * Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
 * Cat's Eye (1988)

 * An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
 * Cat's Eye (1988)

 * Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.
 * Wilderness Tips (1991)

 * War is what happens when language fails.
 * The Robber Bride (1993), Ch. 6

 * Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.
 * The Robber Bride

 * I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.
 * Alias Grace (1996)

 * I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.
 * The Tent (2006)

 * I can tell you that once upon a time when I was doing public events people would ask me, "What do you think about the arts?, What do you think of the role of women?, What do you think of men?, What do you think of all of these things?", and now they ask one thing, and that one thing is this, "Is there hope?"
 * Turning Pages: The Life and Literature of Margaret Atwood (September 13, 2007) Official television documentary credited on http://www.margaretatwood.ca/books_on.php

 * I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account. My first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods on Twitter, one of them with my picture. This grew; I gave commands; then all other Margaret Atwoods stopped together. I like to think they were sent to a nunnery, but in any case they disappeared. The Twitterpolice had got them. I felt a bit guilty.
 * "Atwood in the Twittersphere", The New York Review of Books (29 March 2010)

 * I soon had a few thousand people I didn’t know sending me messages like “OMG! Is it really you?” “I love it when old ladies blog,” one early follower remarked. … and they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that "Own the podium" was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested "A podium might be nice." Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: "A podium! For me?" "Rent the podium, see if we like it." "Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?" I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!
 * "Atwood in the Twittersphere", The New York Review of Books (29 March 2010)

Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1976)
that were once outside sharpening themselves on war are now indoors there, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases'''; Why is it (I’m thinking of the careful moulding round the stonework archways) that in this time, such elaborate defences keep things that are no longer (much) worth defending?
 * '''The weapons
 * "The circle game"

trigger-fingers people the streets with villains: as you move, the air in front of you blossoms with targets and you leave behind you a heroic trail of desolation''': beer bottles slaughtered by the side of the road, bird- skulls bleaching in the sunset.
 * '''Your righteous eyes, your laconic
 * "Backdrop addresses cowboy" (1974)

you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso''' I am also what surrounds you: my brain scattered with your tincans, bones, empty shells, the litter of your invasions. I am the space you desecrate as you pass through.
 * '''I am the horizon
 * "Backdrop addresses cowboy" (1974)

you get the rifle down and the flashlight, aiming for my brain, but you always miss and when you set out the poison I piss on it to warn the others.
 * When you hear me singing
 * "Rat Song" (1974)

I will sing a song of garbage. This is a hymn.
 * I am yours. If you feed me garbage,
 * "Pig Song"

the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking,  the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres'''
 * '''In view of the fading animals
 * "They are hostile nations"

over which of us will pay for your funeral though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal.
 * In restaurants we argue
 * "They eat out"

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback edition published by Anchor Books

 * There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.
 * Chapter 5 (p. 24)

Even when there is no one.
 * Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else.
 * Chapter 7 (pp. 39-40)

 * Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
 * Do not let the bastards grind you down.
 * Chapter 9 (p. 52)

 * Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
 * Chapter 10 (p. 56)

 * You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn’t go on to say anything about inheriting the earth.
 * Chapter 12 (p. 64)

 * These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were, at the time; but I see now what they were really about. They were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom. But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.
 * Chapter 13

 * The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.
 * Chapter 14 (p. 79)

Nobody said when.
 * Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
 * Chapter 15 (p. 89)

 * Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
 * Chapter 19 (p. 109)

 * A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.
 * Chapter 20 (p. 121)

 * You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
 * Chapter 24 (p. 143)

 * He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
 * Chapter 24

 * I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.
 * Chapter 30 (pp. 192-193)

 * (She is reciting the Lord’s prayer) Now we come to forgiveness. Don’t worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don’t let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.
 * Chapter 30 (pp. 194-195)

Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better? Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.
 * You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better.
 * Chapter 32 (p. 211)

 * Freedom, like everything else, is relative.
 * Chapter 36 (p. 231)

 * A movie about the past is not the same as the past.
 * Chapter 37 (p. 235)

 * By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.
 * Chapter 41 (p. 268)

 * As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.
 * Historical Notes (p. 311)

 * "Better never means better for everyone." The Handmaid's Tale (TV Series 2017)

Marrying the Hangman
Full text online
 * Originally published in Two-Headed Poems (1978)

may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history.'''
 * '''She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man

without mirrors is to live without the self.''' She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.
 * '''To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live

wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the hangman.
 * In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with

transform his hands so they will be willing to twist the rope around throats that have been singled out as hers was, throats other than hers. She must marry the hangman or no one, but that is not so bad. Who else is there to marry?
 * She must

to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal.'''
 * '''You wonder about her crime. She was condemned

him. What was the temptation, the one that worked? Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least, for if he became the hangman the others would despise him. He was in prison for wounding another man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword. This too is history.
 * He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited

which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror.'''
 * '''My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories,

someone to pull off his shoes, someone to watch him while he talks, with admiration and fear, gratitude if possible, someone in whom to plunge himself for rest and renewal. These things can best be had by marrying a woman who has been condemned to death by other men for wishing to be beautiful. There is a wide choice.
 * He wants only the simple things: a chair,

Everyone said she was a clever woman. They used the word ensnare.
 * Everyone said he was a fool.

 * The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it.

—Condensed from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume III, 1741-1770
 * NOTES: Jean Cololère, a drummer in the colonial troops at Québec, was imprisoned for duelling in 1751. In the cell next to his was Françoise Laurent, who had been sentenced to hang for stealing. Except for letters of pardon, the only way at the time for someone under sentence of death to escape hanging was, for a man, to become a hangman, or, for a woman, to marry one. Françoise persuaded Cololère to apply for the vacant (and undesirable) post of executioner, and also to marry her.

Morning in the Burned House (1995)
you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse.''' You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn’t now. Outside there are sirens. Someone’s been run over. The century grinds on.
 * '''There is so much silence between the words,
 * "In the Secular Night"

The Loneliness of the Military Historian

 * Full text online

that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.'''
 * '''Confess: it’s my profession

if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror.
 * If I roll my eyes and mutter,

women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or, having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. These are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons, lovers, and so forth. All the killed children.
 * In general I might agree with you:

what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. '''My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.'''
 * Instead of this, I tell

or none that can be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway.''' Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right — though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. '''Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them.'''
 * '''Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters,

I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men’s bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.
 * In the interests of research

As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.
 * I’m just as human as you. But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.

On Writing Poetry (1995)

 * Poetry Lecture, Hay On Wye, Wales (June 1995)

 * It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off. This last may be true, at any rate of poets: Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course — being also a novelist — am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

 * I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

 * The day I became a poet was a sunny day of no particular ominousness. I was walking across the football field, not because I was sports-minded or had plans to smoke a cigarette behind the field house — the only other reason for going there — but because this was my normal way home from school. I was scuttling along in my usual furtive way, suspecting no ill, when a large invisible thumb descended from the sky and pressed down on the top of my head. A poem formed. It was quite a gloomy poem: the poems of the young usually are. It was a gift, this poem — a gift from an anonymous donor, and, as such, both exciting and sinister at the same time. I suspect this is the way all poets begin writing poetry, only they don't want to admit it, so they make up more rational explanations. But this is the true explanation, and I defy anyone to disprove it.

 * I did not know that the rules about these things were different if you were female. I did not know that "poetess" was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know — yet — that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

 * As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, during my childhood, to have been born in November, as there wasn't much inspiration for birthday party motifs. February children got hearts, May ones flowers, but what was there for me? A cake surrounded by withered leaves? November was a drab, dark and wet month, lacking even snow; its only noteworthy festival was Remembrance Day. But in adult life I discovered that November was, astrologically speaking, the month of sex, death and regeneration, and that November First was the Day of the Dead. It still wouldn't have been much good for birthday parties, but it was just fine for poetry, which tends to revolve a good deal around sex and death, with regeneration optional.

 * My English teacher from 1955, run to ground by some documentary crew trying to explain my life, said that in her class I had showed no particular promise. This was true. Until the descent of the giant thumb, I showed no particular promise. I also showed no particular promise for some time afterwards, but I did not know this. A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately. If I had not been ignorant in this particular way, I would not have announced to an assortment of my high school female friends, in the cafeteria one brown-bag lunchtime, that I was going to be a writer. I said "writer," not "poet;" I did have some common sense. But my announcement was certainly a conversation-stopper. Sticks of celery were suspended in mid-crunch, peanut-butter sandwiches paused halfway between table and mouth; nobody said a word. One of those present reminded me of this incident recently — I had repressed it — and said she had been simply astounded. "Why?," I said. "Because I wanted to be a writer?" "No," she said. "Because you had the guts to say it out loud."

 * The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian. It would have been worse if I'd been a boy, though. Never mind the fact that all the really stirring poems I'd read at that time had been about slaughter, mayhem, sex and death — poetry was thought of as existing in the pastel female realm, along with embroidery and flower arranging. If I'd been male I would probably have had to roll around in the mud, in some boring skirmish over whether or not I was a sissy.

 * I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties — unlike now — female journalists always ended up writing the obituaries and the ladies' page. But how was I to make a living? There was not a roaring market in poetry, there, then. I thought of running away and being a waitress, which I later tried, but got very tired and thin; there's nothing like clearing away other people's mushed-up dinners to make you lose your appetite

 * After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing; and through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean Wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight

 * Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.

 * A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a's for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I'd kept some.

 * I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time. Wordsworth was sort of right when he said, "Poets in their youth begin in gladness/ But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness." Except that sometimes poets skip the gladness and go straight to the despondency. Why is that? Part of it is the conditions under which poets work — giving all, receiving little in return from an age that by and large ignores them — and part of it is cultural expectation — "The lunatic, the lover and the poet," says Shakespeare, and notice which comes first. My own theory is that poetry is composed with the melancholy side of the brain, and that if you do nothing but, you may find yourself going slowly down a long dark tunnel with no exit. I have avoided this by being ambidextrous: I write novels too. But when I find myself writing poetry again, it always has the surprise of that first unexpected and anonymous gift.

Dancing Girls (1996)

 * Her mother volunteered that the thing about people from another culture was that you could never tell whether they were insane or not because their ways were so different.
 * Short story, 'The Man from Mars' , at p.26 [Page numbers per the 1996 Vintage Books paperback edition.]

 * She attracted people he called "sponges".
 * Short story, 'Betty' , at p.34

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

 * Speech at the Stratford Festival (September 1997)

 * It must be said at the outset that the field of mental illness has always been debatable ground. Who is sane, who isn't, and who is qualified to judge? Standards have fluctuated wildly, and abuses have been numerous. In the last century, in the United States, a wife could be committed to an asylum on the say-so of her husband and two easily-paid-off doctors alone, and there are cases on record of wives who were "put away" for holding theological opinions that differed from those of the husband, or for refusing to have as much sex as he would like.

 * That old standby of melodrama, the rich uncle shoved into the bin so the greedy relatives could get their hands on his estate, had a sound basis in fact. The Victorians cleaned up the straw and the chains of the old Bedlam-like institutions of the eighteenth century, but they didn't always clean up the practices. Patients were drugged, starved, drained of vast quantities of blood, beaten up, swung from ropes, immersed in cold water and whirled around in the air upside-down, all in the belief that it would improve their mental states. Ask yourself whether this is likely to have been true.

 * For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.

 * For a thousand years, the Bible was almost the only book people read, if they could read at all. The stories that were officially told and portrayed were Biblical and religious stories. That other fount of Western civilization as we know it today — the Greek classics — went largely unknown until the Renaissance. For our purposes, there's a noteworthy difference between these two literatures: in the Bible people are hardly ever said to be mad as such, whereas in Greek drama they go off their rockers with alarming frequency. It was the rediscovery of the classics that stimulated the long procession of literary madpeople of the past four hundred years.

 * However, there are all sorts of behaviours in the Bible that might be called mad now, but aren't designated as insanity by the text itself. People see visions — of angels going up and down ladders, of fiery chariots — and, like Moses, who hears a bush talking, and Balaam the prophet who has a conversation with his donkey, they hear voices of those who cannot be said to be present in any usual sense of the word. They also speak in tongues, as the disciples do at Pentecost. Like madness, the visions, the voices and the speaking in tongues are due to external and usually divine agencies. In a world so permeated with supernatural powers, there are no accidents, and in one so riddled with prophets — who went into a frenzy while prophesying — many more kinds of behaviour were accepted as normal, at least for a prophet or an inspired person, than would be the case now. John the Baptist, dressed in animal skins and wandering around in the wilderness denouncing his social superiors, was not thought of as a de-institutionalized street person who's gone off his medications, but as a saint. And this was the pattern for mediaeval views of aberrant behaviour — if you were acting crazy it was a divine punishment, or else you were possessed, by powers either divine or demonic — perhaps aided, in the latter case, by witches.

 * What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice — that is, madness is a dandy theatrical element. It focuses the audience's attention and increases suspense, since you never know what a mad person may get up to next; and Shakespeare himself makes use of it in many forms. In King Lear, there's a scene in which one man pretending to be mad, another who has really gone mad, and a third who has probably always been a little addled, are brought together for purposes of comparison, irony, pathos, and tour de force acting. In Hamlet, there are two variations — Hamlet himself, who assumes madness, and Ophelia, who really does go winsomely bonkers. In MacBeth, it's Lady MacBeth who snaps.

 * When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

 * We tend to think of Freud as a great innovator, but the truth is that he himself rested, like a ship on an iceberg, on a huge body of theory and knowledge which had accumulated before his time. Even the famous Unconscious had made its appearance at least seven decades earlier. As for such supposedly modern phenomena as multiple personalities, the vogue for them began in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the first case in which the perpetrator of a murder pleaded amnesia, and got off, was in the eighteen eighties.

 * As I was writing about Grace Marks, and about her interlude in the Asylum, I came to see her in context — the context of other people's opinions, both the popular images of madness and the scientific explanations for it available at the time. A lot of what was believed and said on the subject appears like sheer lunacy to us now. But we shouldn't be too arrogant — how many of our own theories will look silly when those who follow us have come up with something better? But whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience — who knows when such a malady may strike? When "mad," at least in literature, you aren't yourself; you take on another self, a self that is either not you at all, or a truer, more elemental one than the person you're used to seeing in the mirror. You're in danger of becoming, in Shakespeare's works, a mere picture or beast, and in Susanna Moodie's words, a mere machine; or else you may become an inspired prophet, a truth-sayer, a shaman, one who oversteps the boundaries of the ordinarily visible and audible, and also, and especially, the ordinarily sayable. Portraying this process is deep power for the artist, partly because it's a little too close to the process of artistic creation itself, and partly because the prospect of losing our self and being taken over by another, unfamiliar self is one of our deepest human fears.

The Blind Assassin (2000)

 * Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left but charred smithereens.
 * first lines

 * All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. …Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

 * The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Oryx and Crake (2003)

 * Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.

 * Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

 * He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.

 * After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.

 * “All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”

 * “When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.”

 * “There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.”

 * “He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.”

 * “I am not my childhood," Snowman says out loud.

 * “Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain."

The Year of the Flood (2009)
''We are using up the Earth. It is almost gone.''
 * Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable.

 * “What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”

 * You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.

 * “we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”

 * I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it.

 * How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.

 * “We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”

 * Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.

 * As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.

 * “I'm fine," said Pilar, "for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.”

 * You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.

 * “It's better to hope than mope!”

 * time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.

The Progressive interview (2010)

 * "A Progressive Interview With Margaret Atwood" by Matthew Rothschild, in The Progressive (2 December 2010)

 * There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after World War I. And almost immediately one of the utopias that people were trying to construct, namely the Soviet Union, threw out a writer called Zamyatin who wrote a seminal book called We, which contains the seeds of Orwell and Huxley. Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived. … I don’t believe in a perfect world. I don’t believe it’s achievable, and I believe the people who try to achieve it usually end up turning it into something like Cambodia or something very similar because purity tests set in. Are you ideologically pure enough to be allowed to live? Well, it turns out that very few people are, so you end up with a big powerful struggle and a mass killing scene.

 * The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.

 * After I wrote Handmaid’s Tale, people came up to me and asked why weren’t there any protests. And I said, “You don’t understand totalitarianism.” A real totalitarianism doesn’t fool around with protests in the streets.

 * A lot of people facing fascism didn’t become fascists. I don’t happen to believe that we are all monsters.

MaddAddam (2013)

 * There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

 * “Life is warped. I'm just in sync.”

 * “But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more.”

“Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it's coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.”

“People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.”

 * Why is war so much like a practical joke? she thinks. Hiding behind bushes, leaping out, with not much difference between Boo! and Bang! except the blood.

 * Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic.

 * “Gender roles suck," says Swift Fox. Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.

"Am I a bad feminist?" (2018)
"Opinion: Am I a bad feminist?", Opinion in The Globe and Mail (13 January 2018)

 * My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They're not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn't need a legal system.

 * Nor do I believe that women are children, incapable of agency or of making moral decisions. If they were, we're back to the 19th century, and women should not own property, have credit cards, have access to higher education, control their own reproduction or vote. There are powerful groups in North America pushing this agenda, but they are not usually considered feminists.

 * Furthermore, I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women there have to be civil and human rights, period …

 * … Anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous.

Quotes about Margaret Atwood

 * she has this future that is totally non-technological; it gets harder and harder to see how we would get to a non-technological future without a terrible war or something, simply because people find technology so convenient. So it isn't likely that they would just give it up. It was an interesting book.
 * 1997 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009)

 * My writing ambition was sharpened by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, an unapologetically political novel that reminds us of what it costs to be a woman in this world or the next.
 * Roxane Gay interview quoted here

 * Margaret Atwood has written: "You tell the story you have to tell; let others tell the story that they have to tell."
 * 1996 interview in Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee Edited by Bradley C. Edwards (2009)

respect for the irrational center of the psyche and the healing experiences beyond logical control, her insistence on joining the divided head and body, her awareness of roleplaying and how women suffocate in the narrow crevices of sexual identity, she is part of that growing women's culture already...
 * Margaret Atwood is an extraordinarily good writer who has produced widely different books: so far, two novels, five books of poetry, and a critical guide to Canadian literature. She possesses an unusual combination of wit and satiric edge, a fine critical intelligence, and an ability to go deep into the irrational earth of the psyche. Her books are varied in genre yet through everyone of them run victor/victim and quest for self-themes, a set of symbols, and a developing underlay of theory. Some themes she shares with other Canadians, and others are characteristic of our developing women's culture. All are vital and juicy...Atwood is a large and remarkable writer. Her concerns are nowhere petty. Her novels and poems move and engage me deeply, can matter to people who read them. As she has come to identify herself consciously, cannily, looking all ways in that tradition she has defined as literature of a victimized colony, I hope that she will also come to help consciously define another growing body to which her work in many of its themes belongs: a women's culture. With her concern with living by eating, with that quest for the self that Barbara Demming has found at the heart of major works by women from the last 150 years with her passion for becoming conscious of one's victimization and ceasing to acquiesce, with her insistence on nature as a living whole of which we are all interdependent parts, with her
 * Marge Piercy "Beyond Victimhood" in Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt (1983)

 * Surfacing is not a programmatic novel. It is the work of a poet, filled with animistic and super-natural materials.
 * Adrienne Rich, “Motherhood and Daughterhood”

title: Margaret Atwood


text:
Talk:Margaret Atwood

Transwiki of "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum"
This article, originally titled Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, was transwikied from en.wikipedia.org. List of contributors: 216.177.2.140 02:11, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * [2005-01-21T20:55:12Z] 209.82.42.132 ( started entry )
 * [2005-01-21T21:01:40Z] Plop ( speedy deletion )
 * [2005-01-22T10:53:58Z] SWAdair ( rm Speedy tag, add )

Unsourced
Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to Margaret Atwood. --Antiquary 18:24, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
 * . . . time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee. . . . I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

.
 * A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
 * A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

 * A word after a word after a word is power (from "Spelling").

 * An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

 * Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

 * Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one.

 * Canada was built on dead beavers.

 * For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

 * Gardening is not a rational act.

 * I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' — the human race — and that we are all members of it.

 * I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

 * If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, "How's the little lady today!" you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly.

 * If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

 * If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

 * In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

 * Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic.

 * Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

 * No one knows what causes an outer landscape to become an inner one.

 * Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

 * Put yourself in a different room, that's what the mind is for.

 * She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when talking about girls; she wasn't a cock-teaser, a cold fish, an easy lay or a sneaky bitch; she was an honorary person. She had grown to share their contempt for most women.

 * Sons branch out, but one woman leads to another.

 * The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.
 * Variant: The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

 * The basic Female body comes with the following accessories: garter belt, panti-girdle, crinoline, camisole, bustle, brassiere, stomacher, chemise, virgin zone, spike heels, nose ring, veil, kid gloves, fishnet stockings, fichu, bandeau, Merry Widow, weepers, chokers, barrettes, bangles, beads, lorgnette, feather boa, basic black, compact, Lycra stretch one-piece with modesty panel, designer peignoir, flannel nightie, lace teddy, bed, head.

 * The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not "Am I really that oppressed?" but "Am I really that boring?".

 * The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
 * Variant: The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for love. ~Margaret Atwood, Surfacing p. 107 978-0385491051

 * The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.

 * Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.

 * We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

 * We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

 * You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Changing a word in a quote to a word that is politically correct
Regarding the quote about fifty-two names for snow which was changed in this edit to a word that is acceptable today, but is not the word that was used in the original quote. What is the oficial policy at WQ when quoting someone who uttered an offensive word? Anyone? Ottawahitech (talk) 16:17, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
 * WQ quotes should be accurate. Changing words renders them inaccurate. There are many words that are used in an offensive way in quotes that are notable, for example, the words pagan or heathen have been used in offensive ways by Christian polemicists and which may be offensive to followers of polytheism. -- ო ~ #SheSaid 19:40, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I agree - the quotes should never be altered or censored. They should be accurate as written or spoken. ~ UDScott (talk) 21:39, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
 * And the quote in question is hardly offensive in any way. By looking at the Eskimo article on wikipedia, it seems that the word is only controversial in some countries like Canada. But English speakers will be better aware than me about it. -- ო ~ #SheSaid 23:47, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The word is a no-no in north america, I think? The IP who Politically Corrected it, certainly thought so. Ottawahitech (talk) 01:44, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Whether it is offensive or not, it is the statement of the author. If it is quotable it should appear on Wikiquote as the author wrote or spoke it. That said, I know of nothing that prevents adding a brief comment pointing to any controversy regarding a quote. Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 15:36, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Slept in the Gymnasium?
The significance of the following Atwood quote utterly eludes me: "We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball net were still in place, though the nets were gone." What possible significance does this quotation have? Expansion of Wikiquote's coverage of gymnasiums? Providing a pithy remark on basketball hoops? Ross Fraser 04:00, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

I swapped the remarkably tepid quote above for a more quotable quote from The Edible Woman (Atwood's first major novel and not otherwise referenced) as well as correcting the date on the quote from Surfacing (this was 1972, not the 1990's date reported which was the release of a certain paperback edition). Ross Fraser 01:53, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."
I haven't been able to fully track down the source for this quote, but I have been able to dig up various references to it, so I wanted to share them here.

The most common way the quote is phrased is above: "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.". However, various other phrasings are also found:
 * Novelist Margaret Atwood writes that when she asked a male friend why men feel threatened by women, he answered, "They are afraid women will laugh at them." When she asked a group of women why they feel threatened by men, they said, "We're afraid of being killed."
 * A Woman's Worst Nightmare by Mary Dickson © 1996 (published on PBS.org)

And from Margaret Joe, a member of the Yukon Legislative Assembly:
 * a brief quote by Margaret Atwood.
 * “’Why do men feel threatened by women?’ I asked a male friend of mine.
 * “’They are afraid women will laugh at them’, he said, ‘undercut their world view.’
 * “Then I asked some women students, ‘Why do women feel threatened by men?’ ”’They are afraid of being killed,’ they said."
 * Hansard transcript from the 2nd session of the 27th Legislature (December 5, 1990).

Note the addition of the "undercut their world view", which I haven't see in most of the other examples.

Also, as cited (#2253) in Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005, a letter to the editor:
 * Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood once asked a male friend why men feel threatened by women. He replied, "They are afraid women will laugh at them." She then asked a group of women why they feel threatened by men. They answered, "We're afraid of being killed." - Meghan Casey, Richfield.
 * Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) Letters from readers (March 27, 1998)

I'll continue to try and dig up references, but if anyone else has suggestions, that would be very appreciated! 63.251.123.2 21:44, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I found a reference that seemed to provide a source: Second Words (1983). And I found it in there, on page 413!
 * "Why do men feel threatened by women?" I asked a male friend of mine. So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. "I mean," I said, "men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power." "They're afraid women will laugh at them," he said. "Undercut their world view." Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, "Why do women feel threatened by men?" "They're afraid of being killed," they said.
 * Atwood, Margaret, Writing the Male Character (1982) (reprinted in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose from a Hagey Lecture on February 9, 1982, at the University of Waterloo)

I'll add it to the page now. 63.251.123.2 22:18, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

This exact phrasing appears to be from Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker with a few words missing. If you search the phrase in the book, it appears on p. 67 (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0440226198#reader_0440226198). The exact quote appears to be "At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them." EvergreenFir (talk) 06:29, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

 * As indicated above The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence (1997) by Gavin De Becker contains a similar statement, but it also indicates some prior use of such expressions: "It is understandable that the perspectives of men and women on safety are so different—men and women live in different worlds. I don’t remember where I first heard this simple description of one dramatic contrast between the genders, but it is strikingly accurate: At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them." ~ ♞☤☮♌Kalki·†·⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 07:42, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Margaret Atwood


text:
Witold Pilecki

Witold Pilecki (13 May 1901 – 25 May 1948) was a Polish cavalry captain, the founder of a WWII resistance movement Secret Polish Army ("Tajna Armia Polska"), who deliberately let himself get caught and imprisoned in Auschwitz in order to organize resistance there.

Quotes

 * During the first 3 years at Auschwitz, 2 million people were killed. Over the next 2 years, 3 Million.
 * Witold's Report. (1943)

 * I found a joy in myself, coming from the awareness that I want to fight.

 * Dlatego więc piszę niniejszą petycję,
 * By sumą kar wszystkich – mnie tylko karano,
 * Bo choćby mi przyszło postradać me życie –
 * Tak wolę – niż żyć, a mieć w sercu ranę.

 * (Therefore I am writing the present petition/ So that only I may be punished with the sum of all our sentences,/ As—though it would fall upon me to lose my life—/ I prefer it so. —To staying alive with a wound in my heart).

 * The last stanza of the poem Dla Pana Pułkownika Różańskiego ("For Colonel Różański"), written by Pilecki on May 14, 1947 to the supervisor of his case in the 10th Block of the Mokotów Prison.

 * If Józef Cyrankiewicz finds out I'm here, I'm dead.
 * In prison, 1948.

 * The game which I was now playing in Auschwitz was dangerous. This sentence does not really convey the reality; in fact, I had gone far beyond what people in the real world consider dangerous.

 * I was not a[n intelligence] resident, only a Polish officer. I carried out my orders until arrested. I had no sense that I was a spy, and I ask that this be taken into account in deciding my verdict.
 * During his trial, 1948.

 * So they didn't let anybody else off. I can't live anymore, they've done me. Auschwitz was just a child's play.
 * Having just been sentenced to death, 1948.

 * I've been trying to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would rather feel joy, than fear.
 * After the announcement of the death sentence.

title: Witold Pilecki


text:
Talk:Benito Mussolini

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power
This quote: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." does not appear in Enciclopedia Italiana 1932, although often cited to this source. It is very likely not an accurate quote. If anyone can find a source, please post the cite here. The quote has been debated and removed from the Wikipedia pages. Best to post it and then point out it is Questionable.--Cberlet 13:08, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Someone has posted: "[The quote is from Giovanni Gentile, not Mussolini.]" What is the evidence for this? Thanks. --146.115.95.222 02:14, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

 * "This appears to be part of a definition of fascism written by Mussolini for the Italian Encyclopedia (1932) edited by Giovanni Gentile. Unfortunately I cannot find a reliable online source for you." so it should suffice to say it is "attributed to Mussolini". -Kolyvansky (talk) 15:33, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

In a speech in November 1933 (translated in George Seldes's 1935 Sawdust Caesar, p. 426), Mussolini said, “Corporationism is above socialism and above liberalism. A new synthesis is created. It is a symptomatic fact that the decadence of capitalism coincides with the decadence of socialism. ... Corporative solutions can be applied anywhere.”

 * Mussollin was credited with the text, which Gentile probably wrote, but the quote still does not apepar as cited.--Cberlet 19:46, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Isn't that "corporativism" anyway (which I think what the fascist regime's economical structure was called.) User:213.89.77.160 00:33, 6 May 2006

 * Yes, someone is confusing "corporations" with "corporativism". Quote is still wrong.--Cberlet 19:46, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

The question here is not the definition of corporativism, or corporatism, but the definition of "corporate power".

 * A question was asked about this quote on google answers - no definitive answer, but some interesting references  http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=280606 .. Quoted below..

"I am responding to manticore1234-ga's comment, and in a way, also to the fact that your question was not answered to this point.

I conducted an extensive Research on the question. I too, like manticore1234, found sources that claim that the source is the article "La Dottrina del Fascismo", written actually by the Fascist philosopher/thinker Giovanni Gentile, and published under Mussolini's name in the Enciclopedia Italiana. However, when you go to that article (http://www.piralli.it/dottrina.htm and a full translation in http://cosmo.slique.net/~vikrum/mirrored/texts/mussolini/fascism/) you find that the only reference to corporatism is in section VIII, and not in these words. Of course, one would need a hard-copy of this encyclopaedia, to be sure that it is not in other articles. I also found no source that originally refers to this quotation in Italian."

As the only source for the quote is secondary and published sixty years after Mussolini died (in a book about the United States written by an American without Italian language proficiency) I recommend it be removed, especially in light of the gross misuse of this quote over the years and noted false citations involving it. Furthermore as the quote is used in Crossing the Rubicon to express the common misconception that the "corporations" in corporatism are the same thing as modern limited liability businesses it strongly suggests Ruppert had no knowledge of the actual quote or its context or original source. --71.230.38.50 04:24, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I was so puzzled by the provenance of this quote, which was most prominently circulated by Bobby Kennedy Jr. at the time that I created a dual language page at my earliest website. I searched both the original and the translation as best I could, and found nothing that could explain it. http://home.gwi.net/~jscarp/La%20Dottrina%20del%20fascismo.htm ProudPrimate (talk) 15:53, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Here's what might be a useful article for examining this supposed quote: http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/02/07/fake-quote-files-mussolini-on-fascism-and-corporatism/ --John Sawyer (talk) 23:52, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

Methinks he, the skepticallibertarian, doth protest too much. - Kolyvansky (talk) 14:46, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

 * "Former Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, is quoted as saying, “Fascism should more appropriate be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
 * However, The Italian word Mussolini used was corporazione, which means guild, not corporation." [ https://fauxcapitalist.com/2010/04/20/fascism-is-not-the-merger-of-government-and-corporations/ ] --JamesPoulson (talk) 23:17, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
 * At its core, the quoted saying is incompatible with fascism and frankly nonsensical. Under fascism, the state uses the market efficiency of capitalism to regulate and control the economy, namely by concentrating market shares to a relatively few large corporations into cartels, which in turn the fascist state has direct control over. Whereas, corporatism is state control by large interest groups, commonly pictured as large multi-national corporations with monopolistic powers. In other words, the controlling party under corporatism is the reverse of that under fascism.
 * "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."
 * The Doctrine of Fascism (1932) by Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile 64.53.249.5 17:54, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Quote from Gorizia
On July 31, 1942, during the Italian offensive against partisans in southern Slovenia, Mussolini visited Gorizia and held a speech. Among others he is supposed to mention that "Slovenians should be killed like dogs". Since my Italian is very very poor, is this article about this? Otherwise I have some fragments of this speech in Slovenian but I am examining the npov of the source at the moment...

Google gives me nothing on that, sorry.

In Gorizia Mussolini said (this is Slovenian translation from Italian):

"Ta dežela, ki je uživala skozi dvajset let našo posebno pažnjo, skrb in ljubezen, se je izrodila tako, da bo treba strupeni sad pokončati z ognjem in mečem. V službi nam smrtno sovražnih držav in z njih pomočjo se organizirajo tolpe morilcev, tatov in banditov, ki ogrožajo našo vojsko, jo zahrbtno napadajo in sramote. In tem tolpam je domače prebivalstvo prijazno, jih ščiti, jim daje vsakršno potuho. Preden bi mogel roditi ta proces razkrajanja hujše posledice, ga moramo prestreči. In storili bomo kakor Julij Cezar z nepokorno Galijo: požgal je uporne vasi do tal, poklal vse moške ali jih oddal v vojsko, ženske, starce in otroke pa odpeljal v sužnost daleč od doma."

Rough translation in English would be: This country, which enjoyed our special care and love through 20 years, has degenerated, so we must destroy this poisonous fruit with fire and sword. In service of our enemies, bands of murderers, thieves and bandits are organized, which are endangering our army, attacking it from the back and ashaming it. Local residents are friendly with this bands, are protecting them and giving them connivance. Before this proces of deterioation gives to birth much worse consequences, we must intercept it. And we will do what Julius Caezar did with disobedient Gauls: he burned rebelious willages to ground, he slaughered all men or put them in the army, and he led women, old people and children in slavery far from their homes.

smthing like that :)

"Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy"

To Edwin L James of the New York times in 1928

-- Could not find anything that supports that this quote was made by him (also considering Mussolini was not fluent in English). I searched in both Italian and English, and that quote seems to not exist. -- El12345

Unsourced

 * Don't worry, papa, I know there is no such person as God.
 * To his strongly atheistic father before leaving for a boarding school run by Salesian monks.

 * The first thing is the state — and from the state are derived the rights and fate of the people. Humans come second.
 * 1932

 * The history of saints is basically the history of insane people.

 * What is one life in the affairs of the state?
 * After running down a child in his car

 * It's good to trust others, but not to do so is much better.

 * Racism is for the blondes (Germans).

 * Ruling the Italians is not difficult; it's pointless.

 * Socialism is a fraud, a comedy, a phantom, a blackmail.

 * The Mediterranean sea is our Italian Mare Nostrum.

 * The function of a citizen and a soldier are inseparable.

 * He is a pederast.
 * Said about Hitler before the two were allies (he accused Hitler of assassinating his friend, Austrian dictator Engelbert Dollfuß).

Another new quote
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." I know he said this, but I can't find the source. Does anyone else know? --Xhaoz 18:35, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Sir,

This fabricated quote has long been a favorite of two-bit propagandists on both the political left and far-right (the libertarian, free-market capitalists). Mussolini never made the statement and his economic program was not based on the notion of the aggrandizement of business corporations. Rather, corporatism is based on the specific inclusion of labor, state and other peripheral forces in economic structuring. The labour charter of 1927 also clearly stipulated that in instances where private initiative in business became deficient, or where state interests were decisive, nationalization would be utilized. This is not surprising, as nationalized enterprise continued to exist in Italy throughout the duration of Mussolini's first political order and became further cemented in his last order, the short-lived Italian Social Republic.

--Xhaoz (talk) 18:35, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

 * This is explained in Fascism is not the merger of government and corporations. --JamesPoulson (talk) 14:07, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Apparent troll postings

 * here's interesting link on mussolini + 16 others executed: www.custermen.com/ItalyWW2/ILDUCE/Mussolini.htm
 * they should have had quick trial no matter what, otherwise those who did this are no better than executed, lol

It is important to note who esle died with mussolini, simply reverting it with idiotic explanations only shows how some people are ignorant, dont have capabilities to hold healthy conversations on wikipeedia or anywhere else, such actions only make articles look lackin info, so idiotic as this one is.
 * The page is locked but that's good enough for me to make my point, same info will eventually go somewhere else, on one of other articles no problem!

The above posts were made related to an apparent desire to edit the intro with various forms of non-essential and initially incorrect information. I don't have time to comment further right now, as I must be leaving — but there is substantial evidence this is simply troll activity, active over the last few days at least, and not someone who is intent on being a serious contributor. ~ Kalki (talk · contributions) 22:29, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
 * you simply cant go around saying its troll,

words like: "here's interesting link on mussolini + 16 others executed: www.custermen.com/ItalyWW2/ILDUCE/Mussolini.htm they should have had quick trial no matter what, otherwise those who did this are no better than executed, lol  - ; The page is locked but that's good enough for me to make my point, same info will eventually go somewhere else, on one of other articles no problem!   - It is important to note who esle died with mussolini, simply reverting it with idiotic explanations only shows how some people are ignorant, dont have capabilities to hold healthy conversations on wikipeedia or anywhere else, such actions only make articles look lackin info, so idiotic as this one is." is all valid, ideas are good! information is not incorrect when proper website given, learn something dude!

Every anarchist is a baffled dictator
Here is a quote floating around on the web that isn't on the page.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/2hkcs1/every_anarchist_is_a_baffled_dictator_well_maybe/

Does anyone know if Benito Mussolini actually said this and where it comes from? --JamesPoulson (talk) 23:05, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

 * The quote in English is from The Golden Book Magazine Vol. 16 (1932), p. 206. It's a translation of what Mussolini said to Emil Ludwig (Colloqui con Mussolini, 1932): "In ogni anarchico sta dentro un dittatore fallito" (which actually translates as "a failed dictator", not "baffled"). The original quote from their conversation might be in German (a language I don't know). If you look at the English translation from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul (Talks with Mussolini, 1933), they render it: "every anarchist is a dictator who has missed fire." (p. 67). ~ DanielTom (talk) 00:01, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

Google translates the original quote, in Italian, that Daniel provides above, as "In every anarchist is inside a dictator failed", which when you correct the automatic translation's grammar, gives us "Inside every anarchist is a failed dictator." I can't see how someone would have ever translated the word "fallito" as "baffled".--John Sawyer (talk) 23:58, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter's prominent position as a Liberal
Is this quote authentic?

I'm asking because the Liberal label is very specific to modern U.S. politics.

It goes back to FDR's adoption of the word after progressive became a political liability as a result of happenings linked to the prohibition. --JamesPoulson (talk) 04:25, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

So can we all agree that america is Fascist now?
https://www.thedailyfodder.com/2021/02/breaking-biden-just-held-private.html

 * How is this relevant to this page? -- ო ~ #SheSaid 19:34, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

title: Talk:Benito Mussolini