"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

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Terry Eagleton quote about knowledge: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British..."

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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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"Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not."

-Stanley Fish

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"Here, class attendance is expected and students are required to take notes, which they are tested on. What is missing, it seems to me, is the use of knowledge, the practical training."

-Harrison Salisbury

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"Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity."

-Abraham Cowley

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"My father was a lawyer and to my best knowledge nobody in my family before had interest in science."

-George Andrew Olah

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"Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience."

-Carl Clinton Van Doren

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"What is research but a blind date with knowledge?"

-Will Harvey

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