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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
Frontiers
Private
Public
Culture
Time
Shifts
Frontier
More quotes by Terry Eagleton
If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
Terry Eagleton
Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
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 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.
Terry Eagleton
If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
Terry Eagleton
Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
Terry Eagleton
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Terry Eagleton
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.
Terry Eagleton
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
Terry Eagleton
Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.
Terry Eagleton
To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.
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
It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
Terry Eagleton
Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
Terry Eagleton
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.
Terry Eagleton
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.
Terry Eagleton
I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.
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
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
Terry Eagleton
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
Terry Eagleton