Terry Eagleton Quotes
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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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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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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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You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!
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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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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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The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
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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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Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
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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.
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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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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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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.
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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 too much belief can be bad for your health.
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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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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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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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Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
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History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
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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.