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Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.

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
Positions
Radical
Mines
Mine
Position
Best
Like
Traditionalist
Thoroughly

More quotes by 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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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
Terry Eagleton
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Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.
Terry Eagleton
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It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
Terry Eagleton
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The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.
Terry Eagleton
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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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What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
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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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
Terry Eagleton
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
Terry Eagleton
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The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.
Terry Eagleton
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.
Terry Eagleton
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To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.
Terry Eagleton
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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
Terry Eagleton