"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

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Terry Eagleton quote about future: "The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For mos..."

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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

"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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."

-Terry Eagleton

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"I always felt like my future was at stake every time I stepped on stage and that was kind of hair-raising. At some point I just went, don't be frightened, you can't do anything wrong, it's your show."

-Rickie Lee Jones

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"Our challenge for the future is that we realize we are very much a part of the earth's ecosystem, and we must learn to respect and live according to the basic biological laws of nature."

-Jim Fowler

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"There was a certain point in my life where I had to decide that I was going to take my future and Nicole's and not wallow in what happened to me because when you do that, you just keep repeating what's been happening and at some point you have to make a choice."

-Boris Kodjoe

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"If we are to garner sustained U.S. domestic support for future trade agreements, we have to make sure those Americans who have suffered as a consequence of past agreements have an effective social safety net, adjustment assistance, opportunities for retraining and new job creation that enables all Americans to thrive."

-Susan Rice

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"And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past - except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe."

-Clifford D. Simak

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"The Nuclear Security Summit was President Obama's initiative born out of his vision to leave behind a safer, more prosperous world for the future generation."

-Lee Myung-bak

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