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" God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong. "
Terry Eagleton
Strong
God
Weakest
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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. "
Terry Eagleton
Society
Dislike
Important
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Worth
Values
Name
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Life
Believe
Think
" The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture. "
Terry Eagleton
Frontier
Culture
Time
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Good
Practice
Moral
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Some People
People
Goal
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
True
More
Existence
" Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours. "
Terry Eagleton
Those
Who
Indulge
" 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
Say
Yourself
Virtue
" I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me. "
Terry Eagleton
Me
Reading
Think
" 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
Like
Context
Evil
" 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
Think
Enjoy
Ideas
" Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional. "
Terry Eagleton
Truth
Institutional
Truth Is
" Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason. "
Terry Eagleton
Without
Reason
Evil
" With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with. "
Terry Eagleton
Work
You
Home
" 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
Like
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Earth
American
Imagination
" What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press. "
Terry Eagleton
Nostalgia
Friends
Think
" We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and irrational. "
Terry Eagleton
Culture
Conflict
Life
" For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human. "
Terry Eagleton
Goodness
Being Human
Kind
" Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism. "
Terry Eagleton
Sick
Things
Revolutionary
" 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
Like
Literature
" The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it. "
Terry Eagleton
Used
Bury
Just
" Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way. "
Terry Eagleton
Classroom
Young
Man
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Need
Trying
Truth
" Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism. "
Terry Eagleton
Racism
Almost
Nostalgia
" There is an insuperable problem about introducing immigrants to British values. There are no British values. Nor are there any Serbian or Peruvian values. No nation has a monopoly on fairness and decency, justice and humanity. "
Terry Eagleton
Problem
Values
Humanity
" 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
Crisis
War
Question
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Sick
Become
Oppressed
" 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
Us
Past