More Quotes by Umberto Eco
Love is wiser than wisdom.
We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
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.
Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
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.
The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.
Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
Every great thinker is someone else's moron.
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.
There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.
