Top 100 Terry Eagleton Quotes
#1. Jesus reveals salvation, as the Marxist critic and occasional atheist Terry Eagleton observes, to be a matter not 'of cult, law and ritual', but of 'feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich'.
Kenan Malik
#2. 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
#3. I hope to show in the process that critical analysis can be fun, and in doing so help to demolish the myth that analysis is the enemy of enjoyment.
Terry Eagleton
#4. Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.
Terry Eagleton
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
Terry Eagleton
#8. 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
#9. Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
Terry Eagleton
#10. 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
#11. We live in a world in which there is nothing that cannot be narrated, but nothing that needs to be either.
Terry Eagleton
#12. When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.
Terry Eagleton
#13. What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
Terry Eagleton
#14. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith
Terry Eagleton
#15. A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end. This dreary-sounding definition, unpoetic to a fault, may well turn out to be the best we can do.
Terry Eagleton
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
Terry Eagleton
#19. It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
Terry Eagleton
#20. The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.
Terry Eagleton
#21. 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
#22. The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.
Terry Eagleton
#23. 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
#24. Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
Terry Eagleton
#25. 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
#27. The theatre can teach us some truth, but it is the truth of the illusory nature of our existence. It can alert us to the dream-like quality of our lives, their brevity, mutability and lack of solid grounds. As such, by reminding us of our mortality, it can foster in us the virtue of humility.
Terry Eagleton
#28. 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
#29. Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
Terry Eagleton
#30. Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
Terry Eagleton
#31. [God] is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason.
Terry Eagleton
#32. Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
Terry Eagleton
#33. An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.
Terry Eagleton
#34. 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
#35. Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do.
Terry Eagleton
#36. 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
#37. It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
Terry Eagleton
#38. 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
#39. The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.
Terry Eagleton
#40. People do evil things because they are evil. Some people are evil in the way that some things are coloured indigo. They commit their evil deeds not to achieve some goal, but just because of the sort of people they are.
Terry Eagleton
#41. 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
#42. Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
Terry Eagleton
#43. The fascinating is only a step away from the freakish.
Terry Eagleton
#44. To be outside any situation whatsoever is known as being dead.
Terry Eagleton
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Terry Eagleton
#49. 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
#50. Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.
Terry Eagleton
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another.
Terry Eagleton
#54. I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.
Terry Eagleton
#55. Macbeth as a whole is awash with questions, sometimes questions responded to by another question, which helps to generate an atmosphere of uncertainty, anxiety and paranoid suspicion.
Terry Eagleton
#56. Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
Terry Eagleton
#58. 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
#59. If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.
Terry Eagleton
#60. 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
#61. You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
Terry Eagleton
#62. We do not know whether Melville's work is of universal interest because we have not reached the end of history yet, despite the best efforts of some of our political leaders.
Terry Eagleton
#63. 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
#64. Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.
Terry Eagleton
#65. Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
Terry Eagleton
#66. One of the striking aspects of the lines is the way they make us see a tree, with its pattern of twigs, leaves and branches, as a visual image of the invisible roots of language.
Terry Eagleton
#67. After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
Terry Eagleton
#68. The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
Terry Eagleton
#69. Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
Terry Eagleton
#70. It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this is in fact questionable.
Terry Eagleton
#71. I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.
Terry Eagleton
#72. I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller.
Terry Eagleton
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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.
Terry Eagleton
#77. Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.
Terry Eagleton
#78. Culture was now largely a matter of how to keep people harmlessly distracted when they were not working.
Terry Eagleton
#79. It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
Terry Eagleton
#80. Baa Baa Black Sheep' makes Marx's Capital look like Mary Poppins.
Terry Eagleton
#81. Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it.
Terry Eagleton
#82. Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
Terry Eagleton
#83. Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
Terry Eagleton
#84. It is thus the adventure of poetry, not the closure of philosophy, that most truly reflects the human condition.
Terry Eagleton
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
Terry Eagleton
#90. God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
Terry Eagleton
#91. 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
#92. Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
Terry Eagleton
#94. Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism ...
Terry Eagleton
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Nationalism is like class. You have to have it in order to be rid of it.
Terry Eagleton
#98. The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.
Terry Eagleton
#99. If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism.
Terry Eagleton
#100. 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
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