Category: A few great lines …

Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further improved because they are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife, spoon or scissors.
– Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books, From a lecture Eco gave Nov. 1, 2003, in Alexandria, Egypt, upon the (re)opening of Bibliotecha Alexandrina. Published in the Nov 20-26 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

What is interest? It is the involuntary feeling by which we adapt the experience to ourselves, the sympathy which puts us in the place of the sufferer.
– In Dukore's Dramatic Theory, p. 300 (noted January 17, 1994)

For the citizens of the NATO countries, on the other hand, the war was virtual. They were mobilized not as combatants but as spectators.
The war was a spectacle: it aroused emotions in the intense but shallow way that sports do. The events in question were as remote
from their essential concerns as a football game, and even though the game was in deadly earnest, the deaths were mostly hidden, and
above all, they were someone else's. If war becomes unreal to the citizens of modern democracies, will they care enough to restrain
and control the violence exercized in their name?”
– Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War (2000, p. 3)

If anyone notices what [the playwright's] purpose is, he will fail to achieve it. He will stop writing dialogue and instead will preach.- Denis Diderot, quoted in Dukore, ed. Dramatic Theory and Criticism p. 293 (Noted Jan. 17, 1994)

The ancient system of tragedy . . . had the advantage of making its audiences see . . . it was equally insance to aspire to the state of royalty as to endure its existence.
–Jean Francois Marmontel quoted in Dukore, ed., Dramatic Theory and Criticism, p. 290. (Noted Jan. 17, 1994)

For in comedy, everything will be found of such a sort that in listening to it, everything becomes evident.

– Lope de Vega, quoted in Dukore, ed., Dramatic Theory and Criticism, p. 204. (Noted Jan. 8, 1994)

Comparing U.S. and Canadian experiences in an age of global and hegemonic electronic cultgure and communication, Ferguson argues:
“…first, that national/cultural identities are open to influence but they are not necessarily shaped by their electronic media reflection or construction and, second, that assumptions about an undifferntiated global culture as a consequence of consuming the same material and symbolic goods are reductionist and fail even on a continental North American basis. In othe words, we are not what we eat.”
“…Canada's . . . natioanl talent for self-inflicted wounds.” (p. 46)
“[America's] national symbolic exuberance.” (p. 46
“The more compelling sotry is that any distinctively Canadian television and radio survives, given seven decades of American variety, drama and sitcome overspill.”
– Marjorie Ferguson, in “Invisible divides: Communication and identity in Canada and the U.S.”, Journal of Communication, 43(2), (noted Nov. 30, 1993)

Men must learn by suffering
Drop by drop in sleep upon the heart
Falls the laborious memory of pain
Against one's will comes wisdom.
-Aeschylus Agamemnon, Transl. by Louis MacNiece (Noted Nov 16, 1993)

The immigrant needs to grow a memory and grow it fast.
– Jonathan Raban, “The Next Last Frontier”, p. 31, (Noted Nov. 1993)

“The notion of the decentred subject [is] one of the fattest pieces of rotten French cheese swallowed whole by American academics . . .” (p 180)
“The number one problem today is not ignorant students by ignorant professors who have substituted narrow 'expertise' and 'theoretical sophistication' for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought.” (p. 207)
-Camille Paglia, in Sex, Art, and American Culture