Umberto Eco

“Our life is full of empty space.”

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”

“But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”

“From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.”

“But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.”

“I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.”

“Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose.”

“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.”

“The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.”

“I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.”

“With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.”

“The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.”

“The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested,...”

“When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.”

“Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.”

“As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.”

“It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.”

“If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.”

“If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.”

“When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.”