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Travels in Hyperreality QUOTES

Travels in Hyperreality QUOTES

1 " Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.

Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

2 " The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

3 " The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible, he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed. He doesn’t boast of his own death or of others’. But he doesn’t repent. He suffers and keeps his mouth shut; if anything, others then exploit him, making him a myth, while he, the man worthy of esteem, was only a poor creature who reacted with dignity and courage in an event bigger than he was. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

4 " New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn't have to pursue "the real thing. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

5 " Two very beautiful naked girls are crouched facing each other. They touch each other sensually, they kiss each other's breasts lightly, with the tip of the tongue. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

6 " Born as the raising to the nth power of that initial (and rational) waste that is sports recreation, sports chatter is the glorification of Waste, and therefore the maximum point of Consumption. On it and in it the consumer civilization man actually consumes himself (and every possibility of thematizing and judging the enforced consumption to which his is invited and subjected). "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

7 " Chatter then will be phatic discourse that has become an end in itself, but sports chatter is something more, a continuous phatic discourse that deceitfully passes itself off as talk of the City and its Ends. Born as the raising to the nth power of that initial (and rational) waste that is sports recreation, sports chatter is the glorification of Waste, and therefore the maximum point of Consumption. On it and in it the consumer civilization man actually consumes himself (and every possibility of thematizing and judging the enforced consumption to which he is invited and subjected). "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

8 " In other words, to see if through these cultural phenomena a new Middle Ages is to take shape, a time of secular mystics, more inclined to monastic withdrawal than to civic participation. We should see how much, as antidote or as antistrophe, the old techniques of reason may apply, the arts of the Trivium, logic, dialectic, rhetoric. As we suspect that anyone who goes on stubbornly practicing them will be accused of impiety. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

9 " the given language is power because it compels me to use already formulated stereotypes, including words themselves, and that it is structured so fatally that, slaves inside it, we cannot free ourselves outside it, because outside the given language there is nothing.

How can we escape what Barthes calls, Sartre-like, this huis clos? By cheating. You can cheat the given language. This dishonest and healthy and liberating trick is called literature. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

10 " ..there is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy, a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History, and, even, with the European tradition. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

11 " ..the advent of television… destroyed the linear universe of mechanical civilization, inspired by the Gutenbergian model, reestablishing a sort of tribal unity, like a primitive village. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

12 " ..the kind of influence printing has had on modern sensibility… : the shattering of the intellectual experience into uniform and repeatable units, the establishment of a sense of homogeneity and continuity that generated, at a distance of centuries, the assembly line, and presided over the ideology of the mechanical age, as well as the cosmology of infinitesimal calculation. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

13 " Holography could prosper only in America, a country obsessed with realism, where, if a reconstruction is to be credible, it must be absolutely iconic, a perfect likeness, a “real” copy of the reality being represented. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

14 " When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

15 " ...the frantic desire for the Almost Real arises only as a neurotic reaction to the vacuum of memories; the Absolute Fake is offspring of the unhappy awareness of a present without depth. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

16 " Terrorism is not the enemy of the great systems; on the contrary, it is their natural counterweight, accepted, programmed. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

17 " In a certain sense I could agree with the Futurists that war is the only hygiene of the world, except for one little correction: It would be, if only volunteers were allowed to wage it. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

18 " Mais l idéologie proclamée de Forest Lawn est la même que celle du musée Getty qui est gratuitement ouvert au public. C est l idéologie de la conservation, au Nouveau Monde, des trésors que l imprévoyance et le désintérêt du Vieux Monde sont en train de réduire a néant.
Naturellement cette ideologie occulte quelque chose: le desir du profit, dans le cas du cimetiere, et, dans le cas de Getty, le fait que la colonisation affairiste du Nouveau Monde (dont fait partie aussi l empire petrolier de Paul Getty) a affaibli le le Vieux.
Cest exactement les larmes de crocodile du patricien romain qui reproduisait les grandeurs de cette Grece que son pays avait rabaissee au rang de colonie. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

19 " Monks were rich in interior life and very dirty, because the body, protected by a habit that, ennobling it, released it, was free to think, and to forget about itself. The idea was not only ecclesiastic; you have to think only of the beautiful mandes Erasmus wore. And when even the intellectual must dress in lay armor (wigs, waistcoats, knee breeches) we see that when he retires to think, he swaggers in rich dressing-gowns, or in Balzac’s loose, drôlatique blouses. Thought abhors tights. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality

20 " But sometimes you have to speak because you feel the moral obligation to say something, not because you have the 'scientific' certainty that you are saying it in an unassailable way. "

― Umberto Eco , Travels in Hyperreality