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The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

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
Takes
Liberties
Whatever
Flash
Common
Sooner
Fact
Brings
Templars
Comes
Across
Confirms
Sense
Later
Lunacy
Facts
Inspiration
Flashes
Tell
Liberty
Lunatic

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The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.
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Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.
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Beauty is boring because it is predictable.
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The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.
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Books always speak of other books.
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I seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.
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There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.
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Not bad, not bad at all, Diotallevi said. To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.
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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.
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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.
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All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.
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The art of splitting hairs four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We're not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it's the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn't seem completely useless.
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I'm always fascinated by losers. Also, in my Foucault's Pendulum, the main characters, who are in a way losers, they are more interesting than the winners.
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.
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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.
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A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.
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... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.
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The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
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History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.
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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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