Umberto Eco Quotes

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Umberto Eco

Profession : Novelist

Birth : January 5, 1932

Human beings are religious animals.

Umberto Eco

A secret is powerful when it is empty.

Umberto Eco

The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.

Umberto Eco

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

Umberto Eco

Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.

Umberto Eco

Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.

Umberto Eco

Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

Young people do not watch television; they are on the Internet.

Umberto Eco

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

Umberto Eco

We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us.

Umberto Eco

The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen,' alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.

Umberto Eco

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

Umberto Eco

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

Umberto Eco

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Umberto Eco

A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.

Umberto Eco

My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

Umberto Eco

Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.

Umberto Eco