102+ Terry Eagleton Quotes On Religion, Education And Government

Terry Eagleton is an English literary theorist, critic and public intellectual. He is best known for his contributions to Marxist literary criticism and cultural theory. Eagleton is currently a professor at the University of Manchester and has authored over forty books on various topics ranging from politics to literature. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Terry Eagleton on religion, education, government.

Top 10 Terry Eagleton Quotes

1. After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
2. 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.
3. Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.
4. 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.
5. Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.
6. Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
7. Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.
8. Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
• Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
• When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.
• Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
• The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.
• It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
• There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
• Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
• History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
• In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.

Terry Eagleton Quotes About Life

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

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

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

Terry Eagleton Quotes About Evil

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

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

Terry Eagleton Quotes About Literary

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary. — Terry Eagleton

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

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

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures. — Terry Eagleton

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

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

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

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

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

Terry Eagleton Quotes About Language

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

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

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

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

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with. — Terry Eagleton

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

Terry Eagleton Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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. — Terry Eagleton

To declare in St John's words that Jesus and the Father are one is to claim that Jesus's dependence on the Other is not self-estrangement but self-ful lment. At the core of his identity ..lies nothing but unconditional love. — Terry Eagleton

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

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair. — Terry Eagleton

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

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

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

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. — Terry Eagleton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism . — Terry Eagleton

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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

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

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly not constructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that. — Terry Eagleton

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

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

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

Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage. — Terry Eagleton

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

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

To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. — Terry Eagleton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press. — Terry Eagleton

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

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska. — Terry Eagleton

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

Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility. — Terry Eagleton

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

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

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

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

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

It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd. — Terry Eagleton

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

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

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

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. — Terry Eagleton

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons -- reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for. — 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. — Terry Eagleton

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. — Terry Eagleton

Life Lessons by Terry Eagleton

1. Terry Eagleton teaches us to think critically and to question the status quo, as well as to be open to new ideas and perspectives.
2. He encourages us to be aware of the power of language, and to use it to express our own thoughts and feelings.
3. He reminds us to be mindful of the consequences of our actions, and to strive for a more just and equitable society.