Terry Eagleton quotes

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Lying #Imagination #Earth

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

#Art #Philosophy #Literature

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Apathy #Inevitable

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

#Book #Ideas #Bird

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Soccer #Football #Games

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

#Political #Occupation #Invasion

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

#People #Astonishment #Toil

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Truth Is #Deconstruction

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Mean #Different #Needs

The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Two #Intellectual #Trying

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

#Important #Prejudice #Revolution

The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Truth Is #Ideology #Humans

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

#Hands #Population #Pursuit

Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Reading #Necklaces #Beads

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

#Communication #Writing #Hands

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Method #Theory #Term

It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Literature #Language #Speak

It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Thinking #Difficult

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

#Art #Years #Ducks

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Odds #Syntax #Literature

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

#Goal #People #Evil

Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Humanity #Favour #Indulge

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

#Betrayal #Educational #Sick

God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Strong #World #Shame

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

#Stress #Mean #Humanity

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

#Writing #Past #Secret

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

#Diversity #Unity #Culture

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

#Lying #Writing #Compassion

It is true that some liberals and humanists, along with the laid-back Danes, deny the existence of evil. This is largely because they regard the word 'evil' as a device for demonising those who are really nothing more than socially unfortunate.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Evil #Laid Back #Deny

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

#Responsibility #Media #Life Is

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

#Night #Understanding #Owl

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

#Moving #Writing #Past

All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Spring #Desire #Strive

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

#Waiting #Language

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

#Important #Ideology #Critique

Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of '68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Hangover #Uprising #Aftermath

The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Past #Doe #Truth Is

There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Humanity #Bows #Insolence

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

#Becoming #Confirmation #Theory

Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world
-- Terry Eagleton

#Ambitious #World #Arena

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Song #Evil #May

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith
-- Terry Eagleton

#Light #Have Faith #Doe

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Everyday #Speech #Ordinary

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Interesting #Language #Schizophrenic

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

#Lying #Order #Doing Nothing

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

#Past #Viewpoints #Form

The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Winning #Looks #States

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

#School #Facts #Study

In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the 'imaginary' level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis . The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Self #Ego #Tip Of The Iceberg

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

#Slavery #Unions #Fruit

History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Logic #Inevitable #Internals

Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Ivory Tower #Towers #Culture

Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Class #Working Class #Capitalism

Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Democracy #Socialism #Negation

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

#Tasks #Spurs #Socialism

If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
-- Terry Eagleton

#May #Throwing #Mass

All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Thinking #Consciousness #My Thoughts

Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Men #Past #Trying

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.
-- Terry Eagleton

#Reading #Space #Enabling