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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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" 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

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press. "

" Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. "

" 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. "

" I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing. "

Terry Eagleton

Thought

Background

" 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

" 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. "

" Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason. "

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

" 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. "

" Nothing in human life is inherently private. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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

Reading

Think

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism. "

" Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant. "

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