“Fear prophets, Adso, 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. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood. Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of everything truth so that we would not become the slaves of our ghosts. 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 the insane passion for truth.”

— Umberto Eco, “The Name of the Rose”

“When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”

— Umberto Eco

“It’s impossible to understand roughly three-quarters of Western art if you don’t know the events of the Old and the New Testaments and the stories of the saints.”

— Umberto Eco, “The Lost Wisdom of the Three Wise Men”

“I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.”

— Umberto Eco

“The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.”

— Umberto Eco, “The Name of the Rose”

“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”

— Umberto Eco

Goodreads: At the heart of “The Prague Cemetery” is the concept of hatred. What inspired you to explore hatred as a theme for a novel?

Umberto Eco: I could say that there are too many novels devoted to love and that it was time to explain hatred, which is a feeling far more diffused than love (otherwise there would not be wars, crimes, and racist behavior). Love is a selective relationship (I love you and you love me and the rest of the world is excluded by such a feeling), while hatred is collective, social: An entire people can hate another one, and that is why dictators, to keep they followers together, ask for hatred (not for love). I remember that having spent my childhood under a fascist dictatorship, I was continually taught to hate some other country— French, Englishmen, Americans — and was encouraged to love only Mussolini. Happily this kind of education did not work, and this is why I have written “The Prague Cemetery”.

— Goodreads Interview with Umberto Eco about his new book “The Prague Cemetery”

“And thus in the great expanses that were colonized late, where the posturban civilization represented by Los Angeles is being born, in a metropolis made up of seventy-six different cities where alleyways are ten-lane freeways and man considers his right foot a limb designed for pressing the accelerator, and the left an atrophied appendage, because cars no longer have a clutch — eyes are something to focus, at steady driving speed, on visual-mechanical wonders, constructions that must impress the mind in the space of a few seconds.”

— Umberto Eco, “Travels in Hyperreality: Essays”