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There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.

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
Four
Kind
Morons
World
Pendulums
People
Lunatics
Moron
Fools
Kinds
Fool

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I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning.
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If culture did not filter, it would be inane - as inane as the formless, boundless Internet is on its own. And if we all possessed the boundless knowledge of the Web, we would be idiots! Culture is an instrument for making a hierarchical system of intellectual labor.
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Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.
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A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis.
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A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
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A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.
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but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
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What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.
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A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.
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[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.
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I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.
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I love the smell of book ink in the morning.
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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 good of a book lies in its being read.
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Libraries can take the place of God.
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Translation is the art of failure.
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Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!
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Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.
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I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
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