Terry Eagleton Quotes
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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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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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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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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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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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I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.
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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
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All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.
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God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
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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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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.
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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
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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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We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational.
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The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.
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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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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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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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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
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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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If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.
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We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population and endless deferment of fulfillment.