Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

Every great thinker is someone else's moron.

True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.

I'm always fascinated by losers. Also, in my "Foucault's Pendulum," the main characters, who are in a way losers, they are more interesting than the winners.

A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.

If Bush had read all the documents about the Russians and British in Afghanistan in the 19th century, he would have not done what he did in the 21st. He would have understood how difficult it was to control this territory. He probably didn't read them.