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Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Quotes

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Famous Umberto Eco Quotes

“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.”

IfsPersonsLongStillsCountryWholeUseTodayWantedPoliticalCommunicationSceneDegreesArmyPoliceLong AgoTanksFascistsPolitical PowerCoupsIndustrialization
Author:Umberto Eco
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“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.”

IfsWayLongBigsAgeBeautifulCertainPossibilityObjectsOffersConceptsInfiniteUglyBoringContraryRangeNosesElephantsUnpredictableFiniteUglinessEaglesTrunksBeaksBeautiful Objects
Author:Umberto Eco
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“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”

IfsMindHumansLongBookLightLyingSpeakSecretCenturyDivineReflectionLibraryI RealizedDialogueSpokesHuman MindDisturbingSurvivingLiving ThingsMurmuring
Author:Umberto Eco
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“We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.”

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Book:The Name of the Rose
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