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We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we too would become Taliban.

Umberto Eco

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Umberto Eco
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: January 5
Died: 2016
Died: February 19
Essayist
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Medievalist
Novelist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Semiotician
Translator
Lissändria
Umberto Ecco
Umberto Eccounstino
Humberto Eco
Dedalus
Umberto Eko
Oumperto Eko
Eco Umberto
U. Eco
Stop
Civilisation
Christian
Missionary
Become
Thrown
Country
Prison
Going
Countries
Pluralist
Would
Allow
Kabul
Built
Missionaries
Simply
Mosques

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The real hero is always a hero by mistake he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
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Stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position ... The stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation.
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If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.
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Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.
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Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.
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Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.
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They [the Templars] had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic?
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The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions.
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Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats.
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Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
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From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.
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And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation.
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I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
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Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.
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The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.
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Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
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We live for books.
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We like lists because we don't want to die.
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