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" 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
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" 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
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Past
" Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism. "
Terry Eagleton
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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.' "
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Like
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" Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do. "
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" 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
" 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
" Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism. "
Terry Eagleton
Racism
Almost
Nostalgia
" 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
" Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced. "
Terry Eagleton
Life
Language
Identity
" I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate. "
Terry Eagleton
He
Think
I Think
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Nothing in human life is inherently private. "
Terry Eagleton
Human
Human Life
Life
" For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human. "
Terry Eagleton
Goodness
Being Human
Kind
" God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong. "
Terry Eagleton
Strong
God
Weakest
" For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization. "
Terry Eagleton
Civilization
More
Positive
" The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture. "
Terry Eagleton
Frontier
Culture
Time
" 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
" Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant. "
Terry Eagleton
Tolerant
Anyone
Who
" Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason. "
Terry Eagleton
Without
Reason
Evil
" 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 value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing. "
Terry Eagleton
Thought
Background
Me
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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