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" Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced. "
Terry Eagleton
Life
Language
Identity
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" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Life
Leave
Training
" Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism. "
Terry Eagleton
Racism
Almost
Nostalgia
" 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
" Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do. "
Terry Eagleton
Word
Use
Often
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Terry Eagleton
Sometimes
Political
Original
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture. "
Terry Eagleton
Frontier
Culture
Time
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism. "
Terry Eagleton
Sick
Things
Revolutionary
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant. "
Terry Eagleton
Tolerant
Anyone
Who
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate. "
Terry Eagleton
He
Think
I Think
" 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
" 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