Terry Eagleton Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population and endless deferment of fulfillment.
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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.
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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.
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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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It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
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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.
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It is true that some liberals and humanists, along with the laid-back Danes, deny the existence of evil. This is largely because they regard the word 'evil' as a device for demonising those who are really nothing more than socially unfortunate.
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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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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.
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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
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I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.
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Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness.
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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.
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It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
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The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
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It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
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It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?
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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.