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There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
Terry Eagleton -
What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .
Terry Eagleton
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Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.
Terry Eagleton -
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
Terry Eagleton -
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 -
A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.
Terry Eagleton -
If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.
Terry Eagleton -
The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
Terry Eagleton
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If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.
Terry Eagleton -
It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
Terry Eagleton -
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
Terry Eagleton -
Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
Terry Eagleton -
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 -
God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
Terry Eagleton
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I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.
Terry Eagleton -
If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.
Terry Eagleton -
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
Terry Eagleton -
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 -
The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.
Terry Eagleton -
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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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
Terry Eagleton -
I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.
Terry Eagleton -
Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it.
Terry Eagleton -
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
Terry Eagleton