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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
Kind
Prospering
Aristotle
Precarious
Affair
Goodness
Human
Humans

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History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
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It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.
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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.
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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
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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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God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
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One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
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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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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
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It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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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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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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The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.
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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.
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Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
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Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
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