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He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.
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
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Believe
Laughing
Propagating
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Evil
Denying
Hate
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Means
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Power
Combat
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Oneself
Self
Neither
More quotes by Umberto Eco
You cannot believe what you are saying. Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry.
Umberto Eco
My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
Umberto Eco
You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another. You cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.
Umberto Eco
What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
Umberto Eco
I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
Umberto Eco
My collection of rare books concerns only books that don't tell the truth.
Umberto Eco
The truth is an anagram of an anagram.
Umberto Eco
The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.
Umberto Eco
I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.
Umberto Eco
Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.
Umberto Eco
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
Umberto Eco
What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.
Umberto Eco
The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.
Umberto Eco
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.
Umberto Eco
I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that.
Umberto Eco
... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.
Umberto Eco
The real hero is always a hero by mistake he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
Umberto Eco
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.
Umberto Eco
The good of a book lies in its being read.
Umberto Eco
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
Umberto Eco