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"People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction."
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"You cannot sensibly expect a starving 'God-fearing' man to honor the 8th commandment."
"Roman Catholicism is a broken and utterly desperate thing, capable only of malignant mischief in our awakening world."
"Higher income either indicates higher intelligence or lesser morals!"
"The wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling."
"Profanity is the name given to the defilement of the sanctity of human life."
"Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help."
"I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."
"There are enough in the novelty business without us; and we have something better to do. We have to give an account unto our God of what we do and say, and if we have been murderers of souls, it will be no excuse that we flourished the dagger well, or that when we gave them poison we mixed the draught cleverly, and presented it with poetical phrases."
"Always listen to your conscience. If your conscience conflicts with your faith, question everything."
Explore more quotes by Umberto Eco
"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them."
"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."
"I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed."
"If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television."
"The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis."
"Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do."
"I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it)."
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