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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.
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
Faith
Acts
Place
Obstacles
Take
Potential
Many
Indeed
Verbal
Miracle
Minor
Communication
Minors
Hold
Involves
Understanding
Diverse
More quotes by 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
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
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.
Terry Eagleton
Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world
Terry Eagleton
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.
Terry Eagleton
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
Terry Eagleton
Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
Terry Eagleton
The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.
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
The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.
Terry Eagleton
Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
Terry Eagleton
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
Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.
Terry Eagleton
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
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
Terry Eagleton
The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
Terry Eagleton
Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
Terry Eagleton
Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.
Terry Eagleton
God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
Terry Eagleton
The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
Terry Eagleton