Terry Eagleton Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.

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.

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

In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.

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

Nothing in human life is inherently private.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.

Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.

The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.

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

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.

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.

Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.

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

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

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

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.

It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.

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

History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.

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

Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.

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

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.