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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
Achievement
Accommodate
Civilization
Convictions
Positive
Admirable
Belief
Achievements
State
Liberal
States
Beliefs
Diversity
Conviction
More quotes by Terry Eagleton
Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.
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
If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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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
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?
Terry Eagleton
Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
Terry Eagleton
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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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
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
Terry Eagleton
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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The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
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
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
Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
Terry Eagleton
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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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
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
Terry Eagleton
Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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