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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
May
Unscientific
Smile
Evil
Song

More quotes by Terry Eagleton

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There is an insuperable problem about introducing immigrants to British values. There are no British values. Nor are there any Serbian or Peruvian values. No nation has a monopoly on fairness and decency, justice and humanity.
Terry Eagleton
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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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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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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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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
Terry Eagleton
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.
Terry Eagleton
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The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Terry Eagleton
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
Terry Eagleton
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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Terry Eagleton
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
Terry Eagleton
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Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Terry Eagleton
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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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
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It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
Terry Eagleton
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The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.
Terry Eagleton
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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.
Terry Eagleton