More Quotes by Umberto Eco
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.
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.
There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.
To survive, you must tell stories.
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.
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.
We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
