Quotes from Umberto Eco

Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.

Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.

Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country

We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

A secret is powerful when it is empty.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.

We like lists because we don't want to die.

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

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

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.

Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.

I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.

There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.