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Marco Respinti

Italian journalist

Marco Respinti is an Italian professional journalist, Editor-in-Chief of International Family News, member of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), essayist, translator, and lecturer. He has contributed and contributes to several journals and magazines both in print and online, both in Italy and abroad.

Quotes

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  • Good journalism questions the land of a thousand [forbidden topics] even at the risk of uncanny and disturbing findings. …Now, journalists are neither detectives nor spiritual preachers. It is enough when they do their job properly. But there is always also an investigative side to the journalistic profession, as well as an ethical one. Journalists are not detectives but through their job they can perform some measure of investigation; journalists are not detectives, but they can provide facts that detectives may somewhat use. Journalists are not even spiritual guides, but, properly doing their job, they can offer occasions and clues that can also help to somewhat nourish the soul of their readers. Let’s all wisely stay away from preaching journalism, but good journalists can at least avoid poisoning their own as well as their readers’ souls.
  • Freedom is immaterial and universal, and for this reason untouchable and undeniable. While liberties can be denied and curtailed, freedom cannot. While suffering for the loss of their liberties for more than a quarter of a century, Tai Ji Men dizi could always enjoy their freedom. Freedom lives in their souls and spirits and is not affected by external harassment.
  • French philosopher Paul Ricœur (1913–2005), in his book “De l’interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud,” published in 1965, coined the expression “school of suspicion” to describe the collective cultural aim of such famous authors as Karl Marx (1818–1883), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). While proclaiming very different and even opposite philosophies, in Ricœur’s view the ultimate attempt of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche was to teach that reality itself cannot be trusted and fundamentally lies, and that all existing authorities are false. As “masters” (or teachers) “of suspicion,” their credo was not the legitimate critique of existing authorities for their mistakes and misdeeds, but the basic delegitimization of the very concept of authority in itself.
  • Those who merely tolerate fail to acknowledge the full dignity and humanity of others, including enemies. Tolerance is in fact the concession of something that some who consider themselves superiors grant to some they consider inferiors, out of their graciousness or, worse, their haughtiness. When simply tolerated, people do not have an inherent right to exist because they are human beings: they enjoy existence only because someone else recognizes and permits it.
  • When words, ideas and concepts lose universal meanings, and all becomes subjective perception, the chaos of conflicting interpretations, where the only absolute is that everything is relative, rips humanity apart—until Humpty-Dumpty-like masters find enough power to rise above others, imposing their vision to a world that will easily eat out of their hands, since it shares the same relativistic premises.
    ...No one can truly respect fellow human beings as brothers and sisters unless their inviolable dignity is fully recognized.
  • …it is logically absurd to want to defend the environment by making humans suffer for this. In fact, the environment is for humans. As there can be no humans if the natural environment is inhospitable to life, an environment with no humans is not what all of us are interested in. …To function properly, [the society] needs to cherish the unalienable reality of its members. If someone considers a fellow human being or a group of humans or the whole of humanity as an enemy, a virus or a disease to be extirpated, societies become terrestrial hells. …From Tai Ji Men’s teachings one can in fact easily draw the idea that there can be no real care for the environment if there is no conscientious care for humans.
  • Education is not the idea of adding to persons something they do not possess. It is not writing anew on an empty blackboard. It is regaining the consciousness of something that was lost by recalling it to memory. Even better: it is finding what is valuable but is deeply buried within us, and bring it to the surface.
    ...Paideia is in sum an ideal of civilization, independent from how many material things one knows or is able to do. The civilization of the educated is in fact not a society of Einsteins who all know everything. It is a community of free people, whose freedom consists in the ability of reconnecting with their lost selves.
  • A disordered society—to use Kirk’s language—is both a mass and a mess of disordered souls. A band of disordered souls can hardly give birth to a justly regulated community. Order, both in the individual soul and in society, is the science of what comes first and what comes next in sight of decent behavior in all occasions. Order promotes a viable fellowship among human beings, a meaningful social existence, even a personal saintly life. It is a matter of priorities and hierarchy, of choices and waivers. Only an ordered community of ordered souls can feel the moral call to share one’s neighbor’s burdens.
  • Peace is the most desirable of all human conditions. It is a promise of Paradise. When all human worries and griefs will be over, we will participate in the fullness of being with no unrest, anxiety, or disturbance. For believers, this is our ultimate goal. It is also part of our nature. Peace is our fate because peace is our origin. Our human nature is made out of peace, and peace is what we are made for. All troubles are in fact caused by the disruption of our original condition, which is both our origin and our destiny.
    Peace is then quite a serious thing—something that may be cast in doubt today, if we consider how this precious word is too often misused.
    Peace is the opposite of war, in a broader sense, but it is not just the absence of war.
    ...Only deeply peaceful men and women can build a truly pacific society, one that would be able to resist and last.
  • The same truth we trust to finally prevail is the same truth [Freedom of Religion or Belief] is made of. Religions and spiritual ways are not all the same. What is the same is the honest spirit that animates all believers in different religions. What is really true of all religions, including religions that a believer in another religion may regard as false, is the afflatus for truth that motivates them. No matter how different beliefs and believers may be, no matter how many conflicts they may have between each other, that single element, a thirst and hunger for truth, makes them similar, make their devotees sisters and brothers, make them human and unique.
  • Is there a risk that reducing the debate on religious liberty to different forms of state recognition, including the Italian “Intese,” may implicitly or inadvertently confer to the state the power to grant to religious groups the right to exist? In practice, states do have such power in different countries. The question is whether giving such an authority to the state is morally and philosophically correct.
    Perhaps, a state should just watch over the compliance of its citizens with the laws (assuming the laws are just), regardless of their religious persuasion, and leave religious groups alone to live and self-regulate their lives. The state is not the source of religious liberty, although it should acknowledge and protect it.
  • As the movie [The Book of Eli] teaches, words may have the power to convince and move if they are rich and meaningful, or the power to disappoint and let people down if they are poor and prosaic. Media use words to challenge power or to promote alternative powers, becoming either servants of the power, or watchdogs of the power, or another power themselves. All depend on the words that media choose to use: either the words of truth or the words of the yes-men and the servants of the powers that be.
    ...Truth is not limited to its material vessels.
    Media have the power to mobilize for freedom of religion, belief, and creed of Tai Ji Men and all other persecuted groups because they are guardians of words, and words may contain truth. Media only need to start believing it, in Taiwan and all over the world.
  • Let’s interpret [Argentinian American economist Alejandro A.] Chafuen’s remarks in its deepest and broader sense: social justice has little or nothing to do with interference by abusive powers, be it from a government, a rogue bureaucrat, an ideological faction, or an organized group. As [Father Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio] made clear, Chafuen argued, the “justice” implied in “social justice” is not only what the law establishes. It does include the strict, and even technical, legal aspects of the law, but it is chiefly a matter of social concord. It is philosophical before being legal; it is spiritual in nature.
  • Sin and evil will never be eradicated from humanity, but human beings have the moral duty to tame, contain, and battle sin as much as possible. Since politics is the art of governing people for that supreme goal that is good, let us hope that, on Taiwan’s Judicial Day, Taiwan’s politics would find a way to regain its independence from the wrongdoings of some of its branches and corrupt officials, and consider the solution of the Tai Ji Men case as a top priority.
    Only in this way will Taiwan become a full-blown democracy.

See also

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(Related in the sense of Bitter Winter:)

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