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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

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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
Best
Humanism
Human
Bourgeois
Humans
Largely
Liberal
Ideology
Present
Society
Ineffectual
Truth
Muster

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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.
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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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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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If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
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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 capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
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The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
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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.
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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.
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Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
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It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
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The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.
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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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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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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
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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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Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
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In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
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