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Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.

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
Human
Sober
Humans
Scale
Mean
Scales
Behave
Apocalyptic
Capitalism
Devastation
Fantasy
Unimaginable
Used
Profitable
Today
Realism

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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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Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
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It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
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Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
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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.
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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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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
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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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Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
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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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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
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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 silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged, a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
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God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
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History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
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Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
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Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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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.
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