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When you have a foreign invasion - in this case by the Indonesian army - writers, intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression.
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I don't go for people who lead full and satisfying lives.
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Doubts are like stains on a shirt. I like shirts with stains, because when I'm given a shirt that's too clean, one that's completely white, I immediately start having doubts.
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Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority.
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Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual.
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Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.
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The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.
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My job is to look at what politics is doing, not be a politician myself.