“Mario Vinciguerra was taken to a nearby police station, where he was beaten, stripped naked, and left on the roof on a night when temperatures dropped to within a few degrees of freezing. . . . An OVRA torturer drove tiny spikes under his fingernails and into his legs. When he refused to talk, he was boxed so hard on the side of his head that his eardrum ruptured, leaving him permanently deaf in the right ear. The Fascist tortures, which would continue with repeated lashings with a cat-o’-nine-tails, failed to break Vinciguerra. He refused to implicate Lauro or any other collaborators.”

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“You liking another woman should not be mandated. That’s not feminism, that’s communism.”—Iliza Shlesinger

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Childhood is not fixed, nor the stages of life that follow it. And this truth is not merely a matter of historical or ethnological interest, for if our paths are not determined, then we are free to choose among them. At least in principle.

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“I love the story of the famous feminist who decided to get married finally after years of expressed contempt for it, for what she had called the Declaration of Dependence and ‘the sanctioned endorsement of the testosterone conspiracy.’”

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“When Mussolini learned of the appearance of an unidentified plane over the Palazzo Chigi, he was enraged. First Bassanesi had mocked the regime by bombarding Milan with propaganda. Now an unknown pilot had penetrated the sacred skies of Rome, and dared to dive-bomb his own palace.”

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Gaetano Salvemini defined ‘Fascism’ as the voluntary abandonment of hard-won liberties in return for the promise of national unity, purity, and strength. Mussolini had, he believed, discovered a winning formula, one that future would-be autocrats would adopt freely. The modern strongman triumphed by promising to make the nation great again.

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“Mussolini was believed to be the most photographed man in history. . . . He could be seen posing with his pet lion, wearing shorts and boxing gloves, playing the violin, swimming, driving a sports car, fencing, or working a scythe, shirtless, in a wheat field surrounded by happy peasants.”

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Lauro de Bosis was a golden boy: half-Italian, half-American, wholly original. For Thornton Wilder, Edgar and Lilian Mowrer, Nancy Cox McCormack and others who encountered him in the early twenties, he seemed to blaze as vividly as a comet over a chaotic, war-darkened nation.

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“If any one man was responsible for Fascism’s militaristic spirit—and much of its outward trappings—it was not Mussolini, but a short, bald, bow-legged poet, who had long been known to his adoring followers as Il Duce. . . . More than any single person, [Gabriele d’Annunzio] bore responsibility for drawing Italians into the First World War, and for the subsequent chaos that would give birth to Fascism.”

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“We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”

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“When someone apologizes, give mercy. When someone musters up the courage to be honest in good faith, be forgiving. If you are in a position of power, rule in such a way that promotes honesty and virtue among those over whom you exercise power. Any power.”—Chris Nguyen

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We misread As You Like It to endorse a view that spells our own doom.

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