Terry Eagleton Quotes - Page 5

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• All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.

  Terry Eagleton

  Communication, Miracle, Understanding

  Terry Eagleton (2014). “Reason, Faith, & Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate”, p.117, Yale University Press

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• All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

  Terry Eagleton

  Moving, Simple, Adequate

  "Against The Grain". Book by Terry Eagleton, 1986.

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

  Terry Eagleton

  Strong, World, Shame

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• 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

  War, Enemy, Sides

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• For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

  Terry Eagleton

  Kind, Affair, Being Human

  "Ideas for modern living: virtue" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. September 11, 2010.

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• If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

  Terry Eagleton

  Literary Theory, May, Throwing Up

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.21, John Wiley & Sons

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• Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.

  Terry Eagleton

  Song, Evil, May

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• As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

  Terry Eagleton

  Light, Doe, Have Faith

  Terry Eagleton (2008). “The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction”, p.16, OUP Oxford

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• Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.

  Terry Eagleton

  Everyday, Ordinary, Literature

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.2, John Wiley & Sons

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• To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.

  Terry Eagleton

  Jesus, Like Love, Different

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• Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.

  Terry Eagleton

  "The liberal supremacists" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. April 24, 2009.

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• 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

  Brave, Adventurous, Finest

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• Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness.

  Terry Eagleton

  Communication, Writing, Hands

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.113, John Wiley & Sons

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• The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

  Terry Eagleton

  Culture, Frontiers

  "Leveson inquiry: the frontiers of privacy" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. November 28, 2011.

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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.

  Terry Eagleton

  Responsibility, Media, Life Is

  "Leveson inquiry: the frontiers of privacy" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. November 28, 2011.

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• It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.

  Terry Eagleton

  Literature, Language, Speak

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.120, John Wiley & Sons

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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.

  Terry Eagleton

  Odds, Syntax, Literature

  "A puritan at play" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. March 15, 2008.

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• The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.

  Terry Eagleton

  Becoming, Confirmation, Theory

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Why Marx Was Right”, p.115, Yale University Press

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• 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, Thinking, Together

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• Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.

  Terry Eagleton

  Alternatives, Kind, Possibility

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.117, John Wiley & Sons

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• Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.

  Terry Eagleton

  Humanity, Favour, Indulge

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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

  Long, Different, Actors

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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.

  Terry Eagleton

  Writing, Past, Secret

  "Conquering history" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. February 3, 2006.

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• What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .

  Terry Eagleton

  Literary Theory, Literary Genre, Practice

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.79, John Wiley & Sons

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• Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.

  Terry Eagleton

  Past, Men, Trying

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