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By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.

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
Means
Mean
Men
Frees
Abstraction
Sign

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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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The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.
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In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.
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An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.
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In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty .
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We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.
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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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Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.
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The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar queen, alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.
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The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument.
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I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
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When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
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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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We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena.
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For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - le suggérer, voilà le rêve!).
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A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
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The hand of God creates it does not conceal.
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There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
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That is a real attitude - to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life.
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Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.
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