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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.

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
Something
State
Tend
Attract
Pointlessness
Always
Idea
Obvious
Purely
Bearded
Like
History
Material
Grey
Rattled
Art
Notion
Capitalist
Guardians
States
Materials
Sheer
Subversive
Ideas
Subjects
Affair
Notions
Look
Pay
Deeply
Utility
Looks
Literature
Delight
Guardian
Askance

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The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.
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Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.
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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
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Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
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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.
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Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
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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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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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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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Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
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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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