More Quotes by Umberto Eco
Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes.... Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
To survive, you must tell stories.
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages... a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn't be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.
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.
There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
