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Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.
Terry Eagleton
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Terry Eagleton
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 22
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Theorist
Non-Fiction Writer
Researcher
University Teacher
Writer
Salford
Greater Manchester
Giants
Constrictor
Wearing
Commuter
Train
Explicable
Evil
Unintelligible
Thing
Boarding
Make
Crowded
Would
Giant
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More quotes by Terry Eagleton
I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.
Terry Eagleton
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Terry Eagleton
Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
Terry Eagleton
Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
Terry Eagleton
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
Terry Eagleton
A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life.
Terry Eagleton
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
Terry Eagleton
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
Terry Eagleton
What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
Terry Eagleton
Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.
Terry Eagleton
The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
Terry Eagleton
If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
Terry Eagleton
The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.
Terry Eagleton
In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.
Terry Eagleton
All communication involves faith indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
Terry Eagleton
Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
Terry Eagleton
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
Terry Eagleton
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
Terry Eagleton
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
Terry Eagleton
It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?
Terry Eagleton