Top 10 Umberto Eco Quotes at QuotationFun

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In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty.

Preface to the American edition of Travels in Hyperreality - 1986.

Politics, Patriotism, Author

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Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods - 1994 Chapter Six: "Fictional Protocols".

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Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all.

Trattato di semiotica generale - 1975; A Theory of Semiotics - 1976.

Truth, Ethics, Author

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After all, the cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopaedia.

Serendipities: Language and Lunacy - 1998.

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I started to write The Name of the Rose in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.

Quoted in Myriem Bouzaher's introduction to the French version of The Name of the Rose, Postille al Nome della Rosa, Page 18 - 1985.

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The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed. He doesn't boast of his own death or of others'. But he does not repent. He suffers and keeps his mouth shut; if anything, others then exploit him, making him a myth, while he, the man worthy of esteem, was only a poor creature who reacted with dignity and courage in an event bigger than he was.

"Why Are They Laughing In Those Cages?", in Travels in Hyperreality : Essays‎ - 1986, Ch. III : The Gods of the Underworld.

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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. The day after the fall of Khrushchev, the editors of Pravda, Izvestiia, the heads of the radio and television were replaced; the army wasn't called out. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.

Il costume di casa - 1973; as translated in Travels in Hyperreality - 1986.

Politics, Power, Author

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A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.

"Can Television Teach?" in Screen Education 31 - 1979.

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To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods - 1994 Chapter Four: "Possible Woods".

Education, Author

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The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

Humor, Author

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