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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

Children

Faith

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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

Thought

Background

" Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional. "

" Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced. "

" 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. "

Terry Eagleton

Future

Past

" For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization. "

Terry Eagleton

Civilization

Positive

" Real men study law and engineering, while ideas and values are for sissies. The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name. "

" Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable. "

Terry Eagleton

Context

Evil

" There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it. "

" 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! "

" The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress. "

" 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. "

" In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed. "

Terry Eagleton

Business

Learning

" 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. "

" I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate. "

Terry Eagleton

Think

I Think

" Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will. "

" 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. "

" Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. "

" Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic. "

Terry Eagleton

Original

Rest

" Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism. "

" God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong. "

" It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health. "

" Nothing in human life is inherently private. "

" For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human. "

" Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do. "

" 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.' "

Terry Eagleton

Say

Literature

" The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable, too clearly a matter of politics rather than faith. "

" 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. "