Terry Eagleton Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Terry Eagleton

  Literary Theory, Apathy, Inevitable

  "Why Marx Was Right". Book by Terry Eagleton, 2011.

  53 Copy quote

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

  Terry Eagleton

  Mean, Different, Needs

  28 Copy quote

• 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

  24 Copy quote

• 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

  "This milquetoast consensus is unnerved by radical faith" by Tristram Hunt, www.theguardian.com. September 11, 2007.

  43 Copy quote

• 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

  Past, Philosopher, Curious

  5 Copy quote

• 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, Toil, Astonishment

  Terry Eagleton (1991). “Ideology: An Introduction”, p.82, Verso

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Reading, Practice, Literature

  "Literary Theory: An Introduction". Book by Terry Eagleton, 1983.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Abhorrent, Slavery, Unions

  "Why Marx Was Right". Book by Terry Eagleton, 2011.

  17 Copy quote

• Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

  Terry Eagleton

  Truth Is, Deconstruction, Illusory

  "Frère Jacques: The Politics of Deconstruction". Book by Terry Eagleton, 1984.

  93 Copy quote

• Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.

  Terry Eagleton

  Democracy, Socialism, Negation

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Why Marx Was Right”, p.202, Yale University Press

  20 Copy quote

• [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

  36 Copy quote

• 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

  "What would Rousseau make of our selfish age?" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. June 27, 2012.

  7 Copy quote

• The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.

  Terry Eagleton

  Jesus, Pain, Justice

  Terry Eagleton (2014). “Reason, Faith, & Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate”, p.27, Yale University Press

  8 Copy quote

• We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational.

  Terry Eagleton

  Mean, Reflection, Self

  "Culture conundrum" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. May 20, 2008.

  8 Copy quote

• Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.

  Terry Eagleton

  Reading, Understanding, Movement

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.67, John Wiley & Sons

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Evil, Goal

  Terry Eagleton (2010). “On Evil”, p.4, Yale University Press

  14 Copy quote

• Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.

  Terry Eagleton

  Christian, Pain, Commitment

  4 Copy quote

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

  Terry Eagleton

  Spring, Desire, Strive

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.145, John Wiley & Sons

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Christian, Children, Believe

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Thinking, Culture

  "Those in power are right to see multiculturalism as a threat" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. February 20, 2007.

  10 Copy quote

• Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

  Terry Eagleton

  Sick, Revolutionary, Modernism

  "Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism". Essay by Terry Eagleton, 1985.

  13 Copy quote

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

  Terry Eagleton

  Political, Identity, Demand

  "Culture conundrum" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. May 20, 2008.

  7 Copy quote

• The government spokesman announces that there is no truth in the charges of widespread corruption within the Cabinet; nobody believes him; he knows that nobody believes him, we know that he knows it, and he knows it too.

  Terry Eagleton

  Believe, Government, Cabinets

  Terry Eagleton (1991). “Ideology: An Introduction”, p.40, Verso

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Spurs, Tasks, Socialism

  "Why Marx Was Right". Book by Terry Eagleton, 2011.

  9 Copy quote

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