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"The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever."
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"While we are curling down in our comfort zone, the perverted talents of connectivity-designers drive us surreptitiously into a blind alley of addiction. If, however, we succeed in impeding mobiles' unlimited rule, we may be able to relish the fragrance of the 'moment' but also sense the vital spark and spirit of "otherness. ['Even if the world goes down, my mobile will save me']"

"When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovation but as a surpassing good for humanity. And assuming that we survive long enough to use their inventions wisely, I believe the same will be said of the modern Thoths and Prometheuses who are today devisingcomputers and programs at the edge of machine intelligence."

"To a man with an internet connection, every thought and every movement sounds like a tweet or status update."

"I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user."

"At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn't own one is a curiosity."

"Our television signals leave this planet and go out into space...the signals spread out from the earth in spherical waves, a little like ripples in a pond. They travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, and essentially go on forever. The better some other civilizations receivers are, the farther away they could be and still pick up our tv signals. Even we could detect a strong tv transmission from a planet going around the nearest star.' President: 'You mean everything? You mean to say all that crap on television - the car crashes, wrestling, the porno channels, the evening news?"

"Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds."

"Technology forced me to divorce a pixie and remarry a pixel."

"As a matter of fact, when compression technology came along, we thought the future in 1996 was about voice. We got it wrong. It is about voice, video, and data, and that is what we have today on these cell phones."

"There are as many opinions as there are experts."
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)."


"William made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn't understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing sound."
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