Terry Eagleton Quotes
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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.
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I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.
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Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
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Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.
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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.
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People do evil things because they are evil. Some people are evil in the way that some things are coloured indigo. They commit their evil deeds not to achieve some goal, but just because of the sort of people they are.
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It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.
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As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith
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Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.
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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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Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.
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The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.
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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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Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.
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It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
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In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the 'imaginary' level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it.
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Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.
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The government spokesman announces that there is no truth in the charges of widespread corruption within the Cabinet; nobody believes him; he knows that nobody believes him, we know that he knows it, and he knows it too.
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Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed.
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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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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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Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.
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Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.