Terry Eagleton Quotes
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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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Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.
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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.
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Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.
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It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.
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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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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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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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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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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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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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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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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
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Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
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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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Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
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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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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.
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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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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 difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.