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 bac… - Umberto Eco

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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. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes. The day after the fall of Khrushchev, the editors of Pravda, Izvestiia, the heads of the radio and television were replaced; the army wasn't called out. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.

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About Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian philosopher, semiotician, essayist, literary critic, and novelist, most famous for his novel The Name of the Rose (1980), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Pen Names: Dedalus
Alternative Names: Umberto Ecco Umberto Eccounstino Humberto Eco Umberto Eko Oumperto Eko Eco Umberto U. Eco

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Additional quotes by Umberto Eco

True,' I said, amazed. Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or devine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then a place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates cowards. And thus you miss Opportunity while spending your life on the lookout for it.

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