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" Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours. "
Terry Eagleton
Those
Who
Indulge
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do. "
Terry Eagleton
Word
Use
Often
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional. "
Terry Eagleton
Truth
Institutional
Truth Is
" 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
" The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it. "
Terry Eagleton
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. "
Terry Eagleton
Like
Context
Evil
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism. "
Terry Eagleton
Racism
Almost
Nostalgia
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced. "
Terry Eagleton
Life
Language
Identity
" 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
" 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
" Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism. "
Terry Eagleton
Sick
Things
Revolutionary
" 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