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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

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
Aristotle
Precarious
Affair
Goodness
Human
Humans
Kind
Prospering

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It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
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Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
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It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
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From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.
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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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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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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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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.
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
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If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
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Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
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Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
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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.
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Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being takes practice and those who are brilliant at being human (what Christians call the saints) are the virtuosi of the moral sphere - the Pavarottis and Maradonas of virtue.
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