Terry Eagleton Quotes - Page 3

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.

To declare in St John's words that Jesus and the Father are one is to claim that Jesus's dependence on the Other is not self-estrangement but self-ful lment. At the core of his identity ..lies nothing but unconditional love.

Nothing in human life is inherently private.

I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.

There is an insuperable problem about introducing immigrants to British values. There are no British values. Nor are there any Serbian or Peruvian values. No nation has a monopoly on fairness and decency, justice and humanity.

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.

It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.

When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.

It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.

Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.

The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.

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.

There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.

Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.

The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.

All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.

Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.

If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.

What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.