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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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
Favours
Favour
Indulge
Humanity
More quotes by Terry Eagleton
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.
Terry Eagleton
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.
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 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.
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
For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.
Terry Eagleton
The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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
For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
Terry Eagleton
Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
Terry Eagleton
If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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
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
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
From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.
Terry Eagleton
It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
Terry Eagleton
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
Terry Eagleton
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.
Terry Eagleton