Umberto Eco

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.

"We are all dwarfs," William admitted, "but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they."

The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief

"We are all dwarfs," William admitted, "but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they."

The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarentee of the good but also by the shudder of the bad.

Terrorism [is] a biological consequence of the multinationals, just as a day of fever is the reasonable price of an effective vaccine . . . The conflict is between great powers, not between demons and heroes. Unhappily, therefore, is the nation that finds the "heroes" underfoot, especially if they still think in religious terms and involve the population in their bloody ascent to an uninhabited paradise.

"You cannot believe what you are saying." "Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry."

"I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand is the relation among signs. . . . I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe." "But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something. . . ." "What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. . . . The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away."

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked."