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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.

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
Present
Within
Grasped
Living
Viewpoint
Form
Understandable
Past
Partial
Always
Viewpoints
Continuity
Forms

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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.
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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
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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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Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
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Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world
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Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
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What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
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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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The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
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I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.
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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 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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Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
Terry Eagleton
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It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
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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.
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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.
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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 humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Terry Eagleton