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The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

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
Culture
Time
Shifts
Frontier
Frontiers
Private
Public

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To declare in St John's words that Jesus and the Father are one is to claim that Jesus's dependence on the Other is not self-estrangement but self-ful lment. At the core of his identity ..lies nothing but unconditional love.
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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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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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Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
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God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
Terry Eagleton
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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.
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The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.
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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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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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The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
Terry Eagleton
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Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world
Terry Eagleton
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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Terry Eagleton
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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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The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.
Terry Eagleton
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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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We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational.
Terry Eagleton