Terry Eagleton Quotes
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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.
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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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Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
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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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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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Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
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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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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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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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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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I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.
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Nothing in human life is inherently private.
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In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.
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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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It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
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If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.
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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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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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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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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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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
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It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
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History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.