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There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

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
Types
Balanced
Mad
Normal
Imbecile
Type
Imbeciles
Stupid
Normality
Four
Mixture
Mixtures

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Naturally, everything depends on one's background books and on what one is looking for.
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The truth is an anagram of an anagram.
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The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
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All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
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If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.
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The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.
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Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.
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You tell me these two were my parents, so now I know but it's a memory that you've given me. I'll remember the photo from now on, but not them.
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libraries are fascinating places: sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of travelling to distant lands
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Then we are living in a place abandoned by God, I said, disheartened. Have you found any places where God would have felt at home? William asked me, looking down from his great height.
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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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Our most noted satirists are true columnists and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented exposé.
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What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.
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It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
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I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
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Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.
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I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.
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At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call to constantly into question the very tale we believe true, because the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the fallibility of our learning.
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