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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.

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
Smile
Evil
Song
May
Unscientific

More quotes by Terry Eagleton

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Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
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There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
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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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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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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
Terry Eagleton
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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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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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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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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
Terry Eagleton
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Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
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Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
Terry Eagleton
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
Terry Eagleton
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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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Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.
Terry Eagleton
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Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.
Terry Eagleton
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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.
Terry Eagleton