What it means to be a ‘better person’, then, must be concrete and practical – that is to say, concerned with people’s political situations as a whole – rather than narrowly abstract, concerned only with the immediate interpersonal relations which can be abstracted from this concrete whole. It must be a question of political and not only of ‘moral’ argument: that is to say, it must be genuine moral argument, which sees the relations between individual qualities and values and our whole material conditions of existence. Political argument is not an alternative to moral preoccupations: it is those preoccupations taken seriously in their full implications. Terry Eagleton
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are... - C.g. Jung

  2. And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

  3. Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea... - Ayn Rand

  4. Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully. - Richard Bach

  5. This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. - Dalai Lama Xiv

More Quotes By Terry Eagleton
  1. After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

  2. In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big — ironically,...

  3. Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?

  4. [God] is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason.

  5. 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.

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