Terry Eagleton Quotes - Page 4

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.

It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.

History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.

Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.

I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

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.

Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.

The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.

All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.

To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.

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.

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.