Art & Creativity Quote by Oriana Fallaci

It is not a conversion story so much as a strategic confession: Fallaci, the famously combative journalist, admitting that Joseph Ratzinger (the future Benedict XVI) makes her feel less alone. The line lands because it violates her public brand. Fallaci built a career on antagonism toward institutions and pieties; to name Ratzinger as company is to signal an unexpected kinship with a mind often cast as the emblem of Catholic authority. That friction is the point.

“Less alone” is carefully chosen. It doesn’t claim comfort, warmth, or faith. It’s intellectual companionship, the relief of encountering rigor in an era she thought was sliding into slogans. Ratzinger’s writing, dense and systematic, offers a kind of moral architecture: not the soft ecumenism of “we’re all the same,” but the bracing consolation of someone willing to draw lines and argue for them. Fallaci’s subtext is that loneliness isn’t merely personal; it’s cultural. She is isolating herself against what she saw as the moral evasions of modern Europe, and she’s recognizing a fellow dissenter - from the opposite side of the ideological map.

The context matters: late-career Fallaci’s work is saturated with post-9/11 anxiety, civilizational rhetoric, and a deep suspicion of relativism. Invoking Ratzinger lets her borrow the gravitas of a theologian-philosopher to shore up her own stance: the world may call you reactionary, but you are not incoherent. In one sentence, she reframes reading as alliance - and turns solitude into a polemical credential.