Terry Eagleton quotes - page 3

Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions. (Terry Eagleton)
What perished in the Soviet Union was Marxist only in the sense that the Inquisition was Christian. View quote
Terry Eagleton
When it comes to who exactly should be exploited, the system is admirably egalitarian. View quote
Terry Eagleton
We face a probable future of nuclear-armed states warring over a scarcity of resources; and that scarcity is largely the consequence of capitalism itself. For the first time in history, our prevailing form of life has the power not simply to breed racism and spread cultural cretinism, drive us into war or herd us into labour camps, but to wipe us from the planet. 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. The traditional leftist slogan ‘‘Socialism or barbarism'' was never more grimly apposite. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. View quote
Terry Eagleton
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. View quote
Terry Eagleton
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. View quote
Terry Eagleton
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. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Ideology is present to such an extent in all the agents' activities that it becomes indistinguishable from their lived experience. View quote
Terry Eagleton
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)
Ideology ... is therefore necessarily false; its social function is not to give agents a true knowledge of the social structure but simply to insert them as it were into their practical activities. View quote
Terry Eagleton
At the level of experience the social whole remains opaque to the agents. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Reading is not a straightforward linear movement. View quote
Terry Eagleton
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. View quote
Terry Eagleton
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. View quote
Terry Eagleton
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. View quote
Terry Eagleton
The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it. View quote
Terry Eagleton
From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response. View quote
Terry Eagleton
For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism. (Terry Eagleton)
For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human. View quote
Terry Eagleton
God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant. View quote
Terry Eagleton
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. View quote
Terry Eagleton