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Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.

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
Well
Numbers
Aim
Turn
Planning
Irrelevance
Courses
Reform
Comparative
Education
Useless
Scholars
Turns
Capable
Endlessly
Given
Subjects
Scholar
School
Number
Increasing
Wells
Higher
Unnecessary

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Our most noted satirists are true columnists and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented exposé.
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The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.
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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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But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.
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Today I realize that many recent exercises in deconstructive reading read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody's mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.
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It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
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Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, How are you, you old scoundrel! clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.
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A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.
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I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood.
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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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You’ll come back To me . . . It’s written in the stars, you see, you’ll come back. You’ll come back, it’s a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you.
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The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts therefore it is dumb.
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Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.
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Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom
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but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
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In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.
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In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.
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Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.
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The good of a book lies in its being read.
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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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