[A] great deal of what we believe we do not know firsthand; instead we have faith in the knowledge of specialists.
Terry Eagleton
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
literature language speech ordinary
It is silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged - a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
people language political frustration call silly fat
What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons -- reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.
women survival men time live human good ideas murder gods struggle understand mistake die abstract reasons ideology physical
All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly not constructive. 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.
simple propaganda place complexity complex
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.
joke postmodernism things sick
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman ''other'' or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.
author writer readers space status pen reader lack
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
man past organic
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.
faith communication linguistics
faith knowledge
[God] is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason.
god
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
politics history activism apathy determinism marxism
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
politics revolution history marxism
What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.
tradition imagination justice academia radicalism university
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
music science evil
A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.
politics socialism ideology
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