Quote

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

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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
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Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
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Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
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It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
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Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.
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Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
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It is silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged, a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
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The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
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What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
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Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.
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Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.
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Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.
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Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
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Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
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There is an insuperable problem about introducing immigrants to British values. There are no British values. Nor are there any Serbian or Peruvian values. No nation has a monopoly on fairness and decency, justice and humanity.
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For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.
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Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
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