Terry Eagleton Quotes
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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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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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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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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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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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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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It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
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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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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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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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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.