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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. "
Terry Eagleton
Say
Yourself
Virtue
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" God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong. "
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" Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant. "
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Anyone
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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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Background
Me
" 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. "
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" 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. "
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Business
Learning
Like
" What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press. "
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Nostalgia
Friends
Think
" 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? "
Terry Eagleton
Culture
Unity
Life
" 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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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
" 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
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Duck
Students
Grow
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Biology
You
Knowledge
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human. "
Terry Eagleton
Goodness
Being Human
Kind
" Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure. "
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Sometimes
Political
Original
" 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
" Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do. "
Terry Eagleton
Word
Use
Often
" If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one. "
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Life
Leave
Training
" 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
" The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it. "
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Used
Bury
Just
" 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. "
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Like
Context
Evil
" 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
" Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. "
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Political
Poetry
Modern
" 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
" 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
" 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