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Quotes

• “Nothing is more commonplace than the reading experience, and yet nothing is more unknown. Reading is such a matter of course that at first glance it seems there is nothing to say about it.”
• “Democracy brought to others through the barrel of a gun is not democracy; to impose it by force is to undermine it.”
• “Pride is not a wise counselor. People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world. The absence of any obstacle to the deployment of strength is dangerous for the strong themselves: passion takes precedence over reason. "No power without limit can be legitimate," as Montesquieu wrote long ago. Political wisdom does not consist in seeking only immediate victory, nor does it require systematic preference of "us" over "them."”
• “A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found. We should struggle not against the devil himself but what allows the devil to live — Manichaean thinking itself.”
• “American society has always exercised a stronger pressure on individual behavior than Western European societies; but in time of war this pressure is notched a few degrees, and starts to become quite alarming.”

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Key facts

Born

( 1939-03-01 ) 1 March 1939, Sofia , Tsardom of Bulgaria

Died

7 February 2017 (2017-02-07) (aged 77), Paris, France

Spouse s

Martine van Woerkens, ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. unkn.; divorced</span>"}]]}'>div. unkn.), Nancy Huston , ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. unkn.; divorced</span>"}]]}'>div. 2014)

Children

3, including Léa Todorov

Awards

CNRS Bronze Medal , the Charles Lévêque Prize of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques and the first Maugean Prize of the Académie française and the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences; he also is an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

Alma mater

University of Sofia , University of Paris

Era

Contemporary philosophy

Region

Western philosophy

School

Continental philosophy , Structuralism

Notable students

Élisabeth Roudinesco

Main interests

Literary criticism

Notable ideas

The Fantastic

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Image

Tzvetan Todorov no Fronteiras do Pensamento Porto Alegre 2012 (7938086378).jpg

via Wikidata · CC0