Terry Eagleton Quotes
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Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.
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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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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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God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
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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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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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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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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.
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Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.
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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.
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Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
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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.
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Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
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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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Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
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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.
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Nothing in human life is inherently private.
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Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.
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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
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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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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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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!