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Serendipities: Language and Lunacy QUOTES

Serendipities: Language and Lunacy QUOTES

1 " The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia. "

― Umberto Eco , Serendipities: Language and Lunacy

2 " At a certain historical moment, some people found the suspicion that the sun did not revolve around the earth just as crazy and deplorable as the suspicion that the universe does not exist. So we would be wise to keep an open, fresh mind against the moment when the community of scientists decrees that the idea of the universe has been an illusion, just like the flat earth and the Rosicrucians. After all, the cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia. "

― Umberto Eco , Serendipities: Language and Lunacy

3 " At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call constantly into question the very tales we believe true, because the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the fallibility of our learning. "

― Umberto Eco , Serendipities: Language and Lunacy

4 " The polemical title is “The Force of Falsity,” and in the lecture I wanted to show how a number of ideas that today we consider false actually changed the world (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse) and how, in the best instances, false beliefs and discoveries totally without credibility could then lead to the discovery of something true (or at least something we consider true today). In the field of the sciences, this mechanism is known as serendipity. "

― Umberto Eco , Serendipities: Language and Lunacy

5 " I concluded that although instruments, whether empirical or conjectural, exist to prove that some object is false, every decision in the matter presupposes the existence of an original, authentic and true, to which the fake is compared. The truly genuine problem thus does not consist of proving something false but in proving that the authentic object is authentic. "

― Umberto Eco , Serendipities: Language and Lunacy

6 " False tales are, first of all, tales, and tales, like myths, are always persuasive. "

― Umberto Eco , Serendipities: Language and Lunacy

7 " The social theory of conspiracy, Popper says, is a consequence of the end of God as a reference point and of the consequent question, Who is there in his place? This place is now occupied by various men and powerful, sinister groups that can be blamed for having organized the Great Depression and all the evils we suffer.10 "

― Umberto Eco , Serendipities: Language and Lunacy

8 " Let us forget for a moment that some of these false tales produced positive effects, while others produced horror and shame. All created something, for better or worse. Nothing in their success is inexplicable. What represents a problem is rather the way they managed to replace other tales that today we consider true. "

― Umberto Eco , Serendipities: Language and Lunacy