Enzo Ferrari

I had deluded myself - as fathers often do - that our attentions would help [Dino] to regain his health. I had convinced myself that [Dino] was like one of my cars, and so I made a table of the calorific values of the various food he had to eat - types of food that would not harm his kidneys - and I kept an up-to-date daily record of his albumins, of the specific gravity of his urine, the level of urea in his blood, of his diuresis, etc., so I would have an indication of the process of the disease. The sad truth was quite different: my son was gradually wasting away with progressive muscular dystrophy. He was dying of that terrible disease which no one has ever been able to understand or cure, and against which there is no defense, aside from genetic prophylaxis (i.e. a medication or a treatment designed and used to prevent a disease from occurring).

As quoted by Gino Rancati, Enzo Ferrari: The Man (1988), p. 87-88 , 1988

His death has deprived us of a great champion - one that I loved very much. My past is scarred with grief; parents, brother, son. My life is full of sad memories. I look back and see the faces of my loved ones, and among them I see him.

Ferrari's response to the death of famed racing driver Gilles Villeneueve in 1982, as quoted by Gerald Donaldson in Gilles Villeneuve: The Life of the Legendary Racing Driver (1989), p. 322 , 1989

They are cars which the sporting client can use on the road during the week and race on Sundays.

As quoted by Quentin Wilson, Great Car (New York: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 2001), 1st American edition, p. 232 , 2001

Among musicians, I had a true friend, Maestro Cantelli. He was a young man of particularly noble sentiments.

As quoted by Fondazione Arturo Toscanini,

Il secondo è il primo dei perdenti. (The runner-up is the first of losers.)