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Giovanni Falcone Quotes

1939–1992 Italy

Giovanni Falcone (1939 – 1992) was an Italian magistrate.

Italy
Judges

Random Giovanni Falcone quote

16 quotes

Even in the most heinous of criminals, I must see the man.

This is the happy country where, if someone plants a bomb under your house and it doesn't explode, it's your fault for not detonating it.

We can always do something: a maxim that should be carved on the bench of every magistrate and every police officer.

(About Antonio Agostino) I owe my life to that boy.

The important thing is not to determine whether one has fear or not, but to know how to live with one's fear and not be influenced by it. That's what courage is, otherwise it's no longer courage, it's recklessness.

Orlando now needs the “temperature” to rise even higher. He will be forced to make bigger and bigger claims every day. To achieve this, he and his friends are ready to do anything, even walk over their parents' dead bodies.

Joining the Mafia is like converting to a religion. You never stop being a priest. Or a Mafioso.

It's all theater. [Falcone was referring to the sirens blaring and the heavily armed police officers protecting him during his meeting with Spanish writer Juan Arias.] When the Mafia decides to do it, they'll kill me anyway.

You confuse independence with arbitrariness, that's the problem: those who are independent must always be accountable. Lawyer Alfredo Galasso: “Magistrates are not.” Giovanni Falcone: Oh no? How come? There is a wonderful law on civil liability and you say no?

Of course, we will still have to deal with organized crime of a mafia nature for a long time to come. For a long time, but not forever: because the mafia is a human phenomenon and, like all human phenomena, it has a beginning, an evolution, and therefore it will also have an end.

Interviewer: But why would they do that? Giovani Falcone: Only the spirit of service.

The mafia [...] has long served as a model for organized crime. It follows that this substantial uniformity of organizational structure allows the term mafia to be used in a broad sense for all major criminal organizations.

It is difficult to dispute that mafia organizations (the Sicily Cosa Nostra and the Calabria Ndrangheta) are probably much more closely linked than is officially acknowledged, and that they not only have a thorough understanding of how the State apparatus works, but also have no qualms about targeting anyone they deem appropriate.

I fear that the judiciary will return to its old routine: mafiosi doing their job on one side, magistrates doing theirs more or less well on the other, and, when all is said and done, the palpable inefficiency of the State.

The Mafia is by no means invincible. It is a human phenomenon and, like all human phenomena, it has a beginning and it will also have an end. Rather, we must realize that it is a terribly serious and very grave phenomenon and that it can be defeated not by demanding heroism from defenseless citizens, but by committing all the best forces of the institutions to this battle.

The awareness is slowly gaining ground that the regulation of the functions and careers of public prosecutors cannot be identical to that of judges, as their functions are different and, therefore, so are the aptitudes, mental habits, and professional skills required to perform such different tasks: the public prosecutor is an investigator in all respects, while the judge is the arbiter of the dispute. We must move in this direction, setting aside the specter of the prosecutor's dependence on the executive and the discretion of criminal prosecution, which is regularly touted whenever the differentiation of careers is discussed. To deny the specificity of prosecutorial functions as opposed to judicial ones, in an anachronistic attempt to continue to consider the judiciary as a single entity, paradoxically amounts to guaranteeing less independence and autonomy for the judiciary itself.

Misattributed

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Giovanni Falcone (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.