Umberto Eco quotes - page 5

What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a 'final' meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is always beyond one's reach. (Umberto Eco)
Every specific semiotics (as every science) is concerned with general epistemological problems. View quote
Umberto Eco
Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. View quote
Umberto Eco
There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People. View quote
Umberto Eco
I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. View quote
Umberto Eco
A sign is not only something which stands for something else; it is also something that can and must be interpreted. View quote
Umberto Eco
A philosophy does not play its role as an actor during a recital; it interacts with other philosophies and with other facts, and it cannot know the results of the interaction between itself and other world visions. View quote
Umberto Eco
The principle of interpretation says that "a sign is something by knowing which we know something more" View quote
Umberto Eco
Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. View quote
Umberto Eco
Philosophies can be judged, at most, on the grounds of the perspicacity with which they decide that something is worthy of becoming the starting point for a global explanatory hypothesis. View quote
Umberto Eco
However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. (Umberto Eco)
The unlimitedness of the sense of a text is due to the free combinations of its signifiers, which in that text are linked together as they are only accidentally but which could be combined differently. View quote
Umberto Eco
A general semiotics transforms, for the very fact of its theoretical claim, its own object. View quote
Umberto Eco
The interpretation of metaphors shifts from the univocality of catachreses to the open possibilities offered by inventive metaphors. View quote
Umberto Eco
The sign is a gesture produced with the intention of communicating, that is, in order to transmit one's representation or inner state to another being. View quote
Umberto Eco
Semiosis is, according to Peirce, "an action, or influence, which is, or involves, an operation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into an action between pairs". View quote
Umberto Eco
How peaceful life would be without Love, Adso. How Safe. How Tranquil. And how Dull. View quote
Umberto Eco
Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. View quote
Umberto Eco
Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. View quote
Umberto Eco
Not every specific semiotics can claim to be like a natural science. In fact, every specific semiotics is at most a human science, and everybody knows how controversial such a notion still is. View quote
Umberto Eco
Affected as they are by a constitutive solipsism, philosophies can say everything about the world they design and very little about the world they help to construct. (Umberto Eco)
As subjects, we are what the shape of the world produced by signs makes us become. Perhaps we are, somewhere, the deep impulse which generates semiosis. And yet we recognize ourselves only as semiosis in progress, signifying systems and communicational processes. View quote
Umberto Eco
Philosophical entities exist only insofar as they have been philosophically posited. Outside their philosophical framework, the empirical data that a philosophy organizes lose every possible unity and cohesion. View quote
Umberto Eco
A philosophy has a practical power: it contributes to the changing of the world. View quote
Umberto Eco
At the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. View quote
Umberto Eco