Terry Eagleton Quotes
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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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God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
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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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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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It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
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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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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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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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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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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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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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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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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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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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Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
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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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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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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.
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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.
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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.