Italian quotes

I earn it by enjoying such authorityand prestige that people will not buy expensive Italian pictures without myapproval.

- Bernard Berenson
Comment on his income, addressed to the Internal Revenue Service. Quoted in The Making of a Legend (1987).

To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horseGerman.

-CharlesV
Attributed.

England is a great and powerful nation, foremost in human progress, enemy to despotism, the only safe refuge for the exile, friend of the oppressed. If ever England should be so circumstanced as to require the help of anyally, cursed be the Italian who would not step forward with me in her defence.

- Giuseppe Garibaldi
  Letter,12  Apr.

When the war in Spain is over I shall have to find something else: the Italian character has to be formed through fighting.

- Benito also called Il Duce [the Leader] Mussolini
  Quoted in Thomas The Spanish Civil War, p.226.

Our fathers have, in process of centuries, provided this realm, its colonies and wide dependencies, with a speech as malleable and pliant as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic guttural, capable of being precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as Spanish, and captaining all these excellences to its service.

- SirArthurThomas known as  'Q' Quiller-Couch
  The Oxford Book of EnglishVerse, preface.