Terry Eagleton Quotes

#1. 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.

Terry Eagleton

#2. If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.

Terry Eagleton

#3. If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.

Terry Eagleton

#4. What Wittgenstein calls a 'grammar' is a set of rules by which we are able to make sense of things; and such grammars are not correlated with reality. It is not as though some of them provide us with a more accurate representation

Terry Eagleton

#5. We are not optimists; we do not present a lovely vision of the world which everyone is expected to fall in love with. We simply have, wherever we are, some small local task to do, on the side of justice, for the poor. - HERBERT MCCABE, OP

Terry Eagleton

#6. When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.

Terry Eagleton

#7. What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.

Terry Eagleton

#8. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

Terry Eagleton

#9. 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?

Terry Eagleton

#10. Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic.

Terry Eagleton

#11. It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Terry Eagleton

#12. You don't bring about major political change simply by changing people's minds. It's their interests that need to be assailed, not their opinions.

Terry Eagleton

#13. There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

Terry Eagleton

#14. Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.

Terry Eagleton

#15. Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

Terry Eagleton

#16. Nothing in human life is inherently private.

Terry Eagleton

#17. There is an insuperable problem about introducing immigrants to British values. There are no British values. Nor are there any Serbian or Peruvian values. No nation has a monopoly on fairness and decency, justice and humanity.

Terry Eagleton

#18. Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.

Terry Eagleton

#19. Without the Ermen & Engels mill in Salford, owned by Friedrich Engels's textile-manufacturing father, the chronically impoverished Marx might well have not survived to pen polemics against textile manufacturers. Something

Terry Eagleton

#20. The artistic is thus very close to the ethical. If only we could grasp the world from someone else's standpoint, we would have a fuller sense of how and why they act as they do. We would thus be less inclined to reproach them from some loftily external point of view. To understand is to forgive.

Terry Eagleton

#21. It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.

Terry Eagleton

#22. The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.

Terry Eagleton

#23. It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.

Terry Eagleton

#24. Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.

Terry Eagleton

#25. The fascinating is only a step away from the freakish.

Terry Eagleton

#26. 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.

Terry Eagleton

#27. 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.

Terry Eagleton

#28. The idea that literary theorists killed poetry dead because with their shrivelled hearts and swollen brains they are incapable of spotting a metaphor, let alone a tender feeling, is on of the more obtuse critical platitudes of our time.

Terry Eagleton

#29. A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life.

Terry Eagleton

#30. Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

Terry Eagleton

#31. 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

#32. Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.

Terry Eagleton

#33. Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.

Terry Eagleton

#34. Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.

Terry Eagleton

#35. Once thought is pulled up short by a yearning that can only be known existentially, it is inevitable that conceptual discourse should give way to the birth of literature ...

Terry Eagleton

#36. The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.

Terry Eagleton

#37. You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

Terry Eagleton

#38. It is always reassuring to discover that great writers are as fallible as oneself. W.B. Yeats once failed to obtain an academic post in Dublin because he misspelt the word 'professor' on his application.

Terry Eagleton

#39. After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Terry Eagleton

#40. It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this is in fact questionable.

Terry Eagleton

#41. I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.

Terry Eagleton

#42. Americans come out of the comparison rather better. They may overdo emotion, but they are not fearful of it. A surplus of feeling has rarely done as much damage as a deficiency of it.

Terry Eagleton

#43. Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.

Terry Eagleton

#44. There is little opiate delusion in Jesus's grim warning to his comrades that if they were true to his Gospel of love and justice, they would meet the same sticky end as him. The measure of your love in his view is whether they kill you or not.

Terry Eagleton

#45. Culture was now largely a matter of how to keep people harmlessly distracted when they were not working.

Terry Eagleton

#46. Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.

Terry Eagleton

#47. It is thus the adventure of poetry, not the closure of philosophy, that most truly reflects the human condition.

Terry Eagleton

#48. On handing the book back to my friend, the woman inquired "Is he gay?" No, said my friend. The woman pondered for a moment. "Is he English?" she asked.

Terry Eagleton

#49. If the oppressed must be alert enough to follow the rulers' instructions, they are therefore conscious enough to be able to challenge them.

Terry Eagleton

#50. 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

#51. The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.

Terry Eagleton

#52. God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.

Terry Eagleton

#53. The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.

Terry Eagleton

#54. Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.

Terry Eagleton

#55. You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!

Terry Eagleton

#56. A revolution which can transform modes of production but not types of speech, social relations but not styles of architecture, remains radically incomplete.

Terry Eagleton

#57. If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism.

Terry Eagleton

#58. It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?

Terry Eagleton

#59. Poetry is concerned not just with the meaning of experience, but with the experience of meaning.

Terry Eagleton

#60. 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.

Terry Eagleton

#61. 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

#62. What Nietzsche recognises is that you can get rid of God only if you also do away with innate meaning. The Almighty can survive tragedy, but not absurdity.

Terry Eagleton

#63. Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

Terry Eagleton

#64. Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

Terry Eagleton

#65. British flight attendants warn you not to tamper with the smoke detectors in the aircraft toilets, whereas American flight attendants warn you not to tamper with, disable or destroy them.

Terry Eagleton

#66. 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

#67. To declare in St John's words that Jesus and the Father are one is to claim that Jesus's dependence on the Other is not self-estrangement but self-ful lment. At the core of his identity ..lies nothing but unconditional love.

Terry Eagleton

#68. If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

Terry Eagleton

#69. We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population and endless deferment of fulfillment.

Terry Eagleton

#70. 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.

Terry Eagleton

#71. That one can understand The Waste Land without even trying is consoling news for all students of literature.

Terry Eagleton

#72. Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone's different needs.

Terry Eagleton

#73. Instead of seeking fulfilment in an object, the subject must acknowledge that it can flourish only through another of its kind. It is when two free, equal individuals engage in an act of mutual recognition that desire can transcend itself into something rather more edifying.

Terry Eagleton

#74. If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.

Terry Eagleton

#75. I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

Terry Eagleton

#76. But if we are not given his real name, then he does not have one.

Terry Eagleton

#77. Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.

Terry Eagleton

#78. I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.

Terry Eagleton

#79. The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.

Terry Eagleton

#80. the artist can never quite get on terms with God, who as far as creation goes has got there first and pulled off a product hard to beat.

Terry Eagleton

#81. It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.

Terry Eagleton

#82. That the death of God involves the death of Man, along with the birth of a new form of humanity, is orthodox Christian doctrine, a fact of which Nietzsche seems not to have been aware.

Terry Eagleton

#83. Morality has precious little to do with feeling in any case. The fact that you feel a surge of nausea at the sight of someone with half their head shot away is neither here nor there as long as you try to help them.

Terry Eagleton

#84. It is on our bodies that the law must go to work, not only on our minds. Reason must govern in collusion with the senses it subdues, rather as an astute sovereign rules in a way that allows each citizen to feel that he is doing no more than obeying the diktats of his own desires.

Terry Eagleton

#85. What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods and vermin is ideology.

Terry Eagleton

#86. Nature is a bottom-line concept.

Terry Eagleton

#87. To relate a Beethoven sonata to the testicles is hardly in the style of traditional aesthetics.

Terry Eagleton

#88. In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.

Terry Eagleton

#89. Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.

Terry Eagleton

#90. Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists. In this respect, being a Marxist is nothing like being a Buddhist or a billionaire.

Terry Eagleton

#91. In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.

Terry Eagleton

#92. All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.

Terry Eagleton

#93. Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

Terry Eagleton

#94. 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

#95. If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.

Terry Eagleton

#96. Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

Terry Eagleton

#97. Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.

Terry Eagleton

#98. The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.

Terry Eagleton

#99. The fact that people are massed anonymously together may be in one sense an alienation, but in another sense it is a condition of their emancipation.

Terry Eagleton

#100. Middle paths in tragedy are in notably short supply.

Terry Eagleton