Terry Eagleton Quotes
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Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.
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The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
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What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
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As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith
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There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
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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.
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Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.
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Nothing in human life is inherently private.
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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.
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Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.
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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.
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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.
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Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.
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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.
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Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.
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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.
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Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
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Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.
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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.
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The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.
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Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic.
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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.
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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.
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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.