Great revolutions are the work rather of principles than of bayonets, and are achieved first in the moral, and afterwards in the material sphere.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Revolution
Preach in the name of God. The learned will smile; ask the learned what they have done for their country. The priests will excommunicate you; say to the priests that you know God better than all of them together do, and that between God and His law you have no need of any intermediary. The people will understand you, and repeat with you: We believe in God the Father, who is Intelligence and Love, Creator and Teacher of Humanity. And in this saying you and the People will conquer.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Preaching, Evangelism
Slumber not in the tents of your fathers. The world is advancing. Advance with it.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Change, Improvement
The great men of the earth are but marking stones on the road of humanity; they are the priests of its religion.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Greatness
The obscurest sayings of the truly great are often these which contain the germ of the profoundest and most useful truths.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Quotations
The Family is the Country of the heart. There is an angel in the Family who, by the mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the fulfillment of duties less wearisome, sorrows less bitter. The only pure joys unmixed with sadness which it is given to man to taste upon earth are, thanks to this angel, the joys of the Family.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Family
The republic, as I at least understand it, means association, of which liberty is only an element, a necessary antecedent. It means association, a new philosophy of life, a divine Ideal that shall move the world, the only means of regeneration vouchsafed to the human race.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Government
Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
No nation deserves freedom or can long retain it which does not win it for itself? Revolutions must be made by the people and for the people.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Freedom
Love and respect woman. Look to her not only for comfort, but for strength and inspiration and the doubling of your intellectual and moral powers. Blot out from your mind any idea of superiority; you have none.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Respect
Labor is the divine law of our existence; repose is desertion and suicide.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Labor
Liberty and equality—lovely and sacred words!
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Equality
The moral law of the universe is progress. Every generation that passes idly over the earth without adding to that progress remains uninscribed upon the register of humanity, and the succeeding generation tramples its ashes as dust.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Progress
Each of us brings with him an element, more or less important, of the life of humanity to come.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Humanity
The angel of the Family is Woman. Mother, wife, or sister, Woman is the caress of life, the soothing sweetness of affection shed over its toils, a reflection for the individual of the loving providence which watches over Humanity. In her there is treasure enough of consoling tenderness to allay every pain. Moreover for every one of us she is the initiator of the future. The mother’s first kiss teaches the child love; the first holy kiss of the woman he loves teaches man hope and faith in life; and love and faith create a desire for perfection and the power of reaching towards it step by step; create the future, in short, of which the living symbol is the child, link between us and the generations to come. Through her the Family, with its divine mystery of reproduction, points to Eternity.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Women
Men of great genius and large heart sow the seeds of a new degree of progress in the world, but they bear fruit only after many years.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Progress
Every Age has its own peculiar faith. Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another, can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Faith
Human judgment, like Luther’s drunken peasant, when saved from falling on one side, topples over on the other.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Judgment
The epoch of individuality is concluded, and it is the duty of reformers to initiate the epoch of association. Collective man is omnipotent upon the earth he treads.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Individuality
Nations, like individuals, live or die, but civilization cannot perish.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Civilization
Constancy is the complement of all other human virtues.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Marriage
Insurrection: Insurrection as soon as circumstances allow: insurrection, strenuous, ubiquitous: the insurrection of the masses: the holy war of the oppressed: the republic to make republicans: the people in action to initiate progress. Let the insurrection announce with its awful voice the decrees of God: let it clear and level the ground on which its own immortal structure shall be raised. Let it, like the Nile, flood all the country that it is destined to make fertile.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Revolution
God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Patriotism
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
The theory of rights enables us to rise and overthrow obstacles, but not to found a strong and lasting accord between all the elements which compose the nation.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Good council has no price.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Advice
A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Nationalism, Nation, Nationality, Nations
By the law of God, given by him to humanity, all men are free, are brothers, and are equals.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Equality
O my Brothers! love your Country. Our Country is our home, the home which God has given us, placing therein a numerous family which we love and are loved by, and with which we have a more intimate and quicker communion of feeling and thought than with others; a family which by its concentration upon a given spot, and by the homogeneous nature of its elements, is destined for a special kind of activity.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Patriotism
Without country you have neither name, token, voice, nor rights, no admission as brothers into the fellowship of the Peoples. You are the bastards of Humanity. Soldiers without a banner, Israelites among the nations, you will find neither faith nor protection; none will be sureties for you. Do not beguile yourselves with the hope of emancipation from unjust social conditions if you do not first conquer a Country for yourselves.
—Giuseppe Mazzini
Topics: Nation, Nationalities, Nationality, Nationalism
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Catherine of Siena Italian Mystic
- Luigi Pirandello Italian Dramatist
- Dante Alighieri Italian Poet, Philosopher
- Francesco Guicciardini Italian Historian
- Benito Mussolini Italian Head of State
- Italo Calvino Italian Novelist, Writer
- Thomas Aquinas Italian Catholic Priest
- Giacomo Leopardi Italian Poet
- Moshe Chaim Luzzatto Italian Jewish Rabbi
- Bonaventure Italian Christian Scholar
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