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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

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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
Conviction
Achievement
Accommodate
Civilization
Convictions
Positive
Admirable
Belief
Achievements
State
Liberal
States
Beliefs
Diversity

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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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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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Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
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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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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?
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It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
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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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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.
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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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Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
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In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.
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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
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Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
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Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
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A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life.
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The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
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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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