When I was a little boy, I was reading Dante and I was saying to myself 'Bravo, Dante, Bravo.' It's so beautiful, the music, the sound, the meaning. I felt like calling him by phone, like a friend.
Roberto BenigniRead
In Italy, the country where fascism was born, we have a particular relation with the Holocaust, but as a turning point in history it belongs to everybody in the world. It is a part of humanity.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The Holocaust is a shared human tragedy that transcends national boundaries.
Roberto Benigni emphasizes that while Italy has its unique connection to the history of fascism, the Holocaust is a significant event that touches all of humanity. It serves as a reminder of the collective responsibility to remember and learn from the past, highlighting that such horrors belong to global history and must not be forgotten by anyone, regardless of nationality.
Themes
HolocaustHumanityHistoryMemoryFascism
In practice
Example use cases
During a talk on human rights, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of collective memory.
More from Roberto Benigni
All quotes →Only comedians can talk about death, life, God and Virgin Mary. If I was a tragic actor, I couldn't allow myself. But with this accent I can do it. I can talk with death in person because I am a clown. Yes. And I am proud to be a clown - very much.
Roberto BenigniRead
I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.
Roberto BenigniRead
When we talk to somebody and we want to be nice or polite or show our more beautiful side, we try to use the best words that we know. This is what poets are doing. They are cleaning the words, they are inventing the sentiments, they are giving us a way to communicate.
Roberto BenigniRead
Similar quotes
Let your vision be world embracing rather than confined to your own self.
Bah'U'LlhRead
Sufism is not a religion or a philosophy, it is neither deism nor atheism, nor is it a moral, nor a special kind of mysticism, being free from the usual religious sectarianism. If ever it could be called a religion, it would only be as a religion of love, harmony, and beauty.
Hazrat Inayat KhanRead
one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul
Kate ChopinRead
There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that that have nothing to lose. People who have stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Read
If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.
Winston ChurchillRead
For a long time we have thought we were better than the living world, and now some of us tend to think we are worse, that everything we touch turns to soot. But neither perspective is healthy. We have to remember how it feels to have equal standing in the world, to be "between the mountain and the ant . . . part and parcel of creations," as the Iroquois traditionalist Oren Lyons says.
Janine BenyusRead