Terry Eagleton Quotes
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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
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It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
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One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
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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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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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Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it.
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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?
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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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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!
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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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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
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History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
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Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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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.