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" I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate. "
Terry Eagleton
He
Think
I Think
Related Quotes:
" 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
" Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism. "
Terry Eagleton
Sick
Things
Revolutionary
" 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
" 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
" 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
Us
" 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
" It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere. "
Terry Eagleton
Compassion
Lie
Values
" In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility. "
Terry Eagleton
Power
End
Life
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing. "
Terry Eagleton
Thought
Background
Me
" 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
Power
Why
Women
" 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! "
Terry Eagleton
Sense
Long
Line
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
History
Art
Study
" 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
" 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
" Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced. "
Terry Eagleton
Life
Language
Identity
" The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart. "
Terry Eagleton
Struggle
Culture
Political
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Matter
Politics
Always
" 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
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Past
Always
Way
" Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history. "
Terry Eagleton
Wonder
Writing
History
" The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture. "
Terry Eagleton
Frontier
Culture
Time
" 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
" 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
People
Political
Down
" 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
Me