#Quote
More Quotes by Umberto Eco
To survive, you must tell stories.
We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.
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.
The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
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.
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.
Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.
Given that there are seven billion people living on this earth, there is a consistent quantity of imbecile or idiot, okay. Previously, these people could express themselves only with their friends or at the bar after two or three glasses of something, and they said every silliness, and people laughed. Now they have the possibility to show up on the internet. And so, on the internet, along with the messages of a lot of interesting and important people - even the Pope is writing on Twitter - we have a great quantity of idiots.
