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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
Train
Explicable
Evil
Unintelligible
Thing
Boarding
Make
Crowded
Would
Giant
Like
Context
Giants
Constrictor
Wearing
Commuter
More quotes by Terry Eagleton
It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
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
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
Terry Eagleton
The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.
Terry Eagleton
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
Terry Eagleton
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
Terry Eagleton
In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
Terry Eagleton
The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.
Terry Eagleton
Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.
Terry Eagleton
The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
Terry Eagleton
Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
Terry Eagleton
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
Terry Eagleton
The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.
Terry Eagleton
Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
Terry Eagleton
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
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
For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
Terry Eagleton
Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
Terry Eagleton