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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
Related Quotes:
" Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant. "
Terry Eagleton
Tolerant
Anyone
Who
" 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
" For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human. "
Terry Eagleton
Goodness
Being Human
Kind
" 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
" Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason. "
Terry Eagleton
Without
Reason
Evil
" 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
" 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
" Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do. "
Terry Eagleton
Word
Use
Often
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. "
Terry Eagleton
Political
Poetry
Modern
" Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced. "
Terry Eagleton
Life
Language
Identity
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate. "
Terry Eagleton
He
Think
I 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
" 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
" God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong. "
Terry Eagleton
Strong
God
Weakest
" 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
" 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
" 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