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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
Power
Combat
Doe
Oneself
Self
Neither
Mean
Therefore
Believe
Laughing
Propagating
Good
Evil
Denying
Hate
Laughs
Means
Preparing

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.
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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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They say that a cat, if it falls from a window and hits its nose, can lose its sense of smell and then, because cats live by their ability to smell, it can no longer recognize things. I'm a cat that hit its nose.
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I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
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There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.
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I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.
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but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
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True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.
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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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When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
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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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I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.
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To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.
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Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom
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I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.
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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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And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?
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I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.
Umberto Eco
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The good of a book lies in its being read.
Umberto Eco