Umberto Eco

“Cartea a dovedit ce poate, și nu vedem un alt obiect mai bun pe care l-am putea crea pentru aceeași întrebuințare.”

“The contents of someone's bookcase are part of their history, like an ancestral portrait.”

“The lamp fell right on the pile of books that had been knocked from the table all in a heap, lying open. The oil spilled out, the fire immediately seized a fragile parchment, which blazed up...”

“Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars...”

“If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.”

“It’s quite possible that mortality is simply the result of poor education.”

“My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.”

“As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.”

“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, d...”

“Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.”

“Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.”

“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.”

“There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.”

“A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appear...”

“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 p...”

“I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.”

“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.”

“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.”

“After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of sig...”

“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...”