Umberto Eco Quotes
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Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.
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The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.
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History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.
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Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
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If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.
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There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
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What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
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Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.
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With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
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The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
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'A sack,' Baudolino explained, like a man who knows a trade well, 'is like a grape harvest: you have to divide the tasks. There are those who press the grapes, those who carry off the must in the tuns, those who cook for others, others who go to fetch the good wine from last year.... a sack is a serious job,'
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The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.
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Today I realize that many recent exercises in "deconstructive reading" read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody's mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.
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I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.
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I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.
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In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.
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It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
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In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty.
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To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.
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The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.
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If western culture is shown to be rich, it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to 'dissolve' harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.
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Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose.
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When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.