"When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything."
"For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign."
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Source: Umberto Eco (1995). “Name of the Rose”, p.215, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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