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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

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To Claim That Science

Terry Eagleton

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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.

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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.

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.

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There Seems To Be Something In Humanity Which Will Not Bow Meekly To The Insolence Of Power.

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In Conscious Life, We Achieve Some Sense Of Ourselves As Reasonably Unified, Coherent Selves, And Without This Action Would Be Impossible. But All This Is Merely At The 'imaginary' Level Of The Ego, Which Is No More Than The Tip Of The Iceberg Of The Human Subject Known To Psychoanalysis. The Ego Is Function Or Effect Of A Subject Which Is Always Dispersed, Never Identical With Itself, Strung Out Along The Chains Of The Discourses Which Constitute It.

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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.

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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.

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When One Emphasizes, As Jacques Derrida Once Remarked, One Always Overemphasizes.

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Schizophrenic Language Has In This Sense An Interesting Resemblance To Poetry.

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Literature Transforms And Intensifies Ordinary Language, Deviates Systematically From Everyday Speech.

Poetry Is The Most Subtle Of The Literary Arts, And Students Grow More Ingenious By The Year At Avoiding It. If They Can Nip Around Milton, Duck Under Blake And Collapse Gratefully Into The Arms Of Jane Austen, A Lot Of Them Will.

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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.

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It Is Difficult To Think Of An Origin Without Wanting To Go Back Beyond It.

The Past Can Be Used To Renew The Present, Not Just To Bury It.

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Understanding Is Always In Some Sense Retrospective, Which Is What Hegel Meant By Remarking That The Owl Of Minerva Flies Only At Night.

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Anyone Can Be Tolerant Of Those Who Are Tolerant.

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God Chose What Is Weakest In The World To Shame The Strong.

Works Of Art Cannot Save Us. They Can Simply Render Us More Sensitive To What Needs To Be Repaired.

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If We Were Not Called Upon To Work In Order To Survive, We Might Simply Lie Around All Day Doing Nothing.

The Frontier Between Public And Private Shifts From Time To Time And Culture To Culture.

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