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Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.

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
Survive
Capitalism
Class
Working
Cannot
Without
Flourish
Freely

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Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
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I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.
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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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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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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 truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.
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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.
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Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
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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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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.
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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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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
Terry Eagleton
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God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
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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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It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
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The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.
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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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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 important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.
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