Terry Eagleton Quotes

“Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.”

— Terry Eagleton

“Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.”

— Terry Eagleton

“The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.”

— Terry Eagleton

“Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.”

— Terry Eagleton

“If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.”

— Terry Eagleton

We like to think of individuals as unique. Yet if this is true of everyone, then we all share the same quality, namely our uniqueness. What we have in common is the fact that we are all uncommon. Everybody is special, which means that nobody is. The truth, however, is that human beings are uncommon only up to a point. There are no qualities that are peculiar to one person alone. Regrettably, there could not be a world in which only one individual was irascible, vindictive or lethally aggressive. This is because human beings are not fundamentally all that different from each other, a truth postmodernists are reluctant to concede. We share an enormous amount in common simply by virtue of being human, and this is revealed by the vocabularies we have for discussing human character. We even share the social processes by which we come to individuate ourselves.

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

“Enjoyment is more subjective than evaluation. Whether you prefer peaches to pears is a question of taste, which is not quite true of whether you think Dostoevsky a more accomplished novelist than John Grisham. Dostoevsky is better than Grisham in the sense that Tiger Woods is a better golfer than Lady Gaga.”

— Terry Eagleton

“Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to guarantee their truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to, that something useful is accomplished by making them, and so on.”

— Terry Eagleton

“[God] is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason.”

— Terry Eagleton

When they first emerged in their present shape around the turn of the 18th century, the so-called humane disciplines had a crucial social role. It was to foster and protect the kind of values for which a philistine social order had precious little time. The modern humanities and industrial capitalism were more or less twinned at birth. To preserve a set of values and ideas under siege, you needed among other things institutions known as universities set somewhat apart from everyday social life. This remoteness meant that humane study could be lamentably ineffectual. But it also allowed the humanities to launch a critique of conventional wisdom.

— Terry Eagleton

Culture was now largely a matter of how to keep people harmlessly distracted when they were not working.

— Terry Eagleton

“The theatre can teach us some truth, but it is the truth of the illusory nature of our existence. It can alert us to the dream-like quality of our lives, their brevity, mutability and lack of solid grounds. As such, by reminding us of our mortality, it can foster in us the virtue of humility.”

— Terry Eagleton

“Baa Baa Black Sheep' makes Marx's Capital look like Mary Poppins.”

— Terry Eagleton

“Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?”

— Terry Eagleton

“Nationalism is like class. You have to have it in order to be rid of it.”

— Terry Eagleton

“Americans come out of the comparison rather better. They may overdo emotion, but they are not fearful of it. A surplus of feeling has rarely done as much damage as a deficiency of it.”

— Terry Eagleton

“The trick is to keep cutting the present off from the past. In this way, you can try to deny the fact that the past is what we are made of, and that there would be no present without it. One of the several problems with this way of living is that it is not clear how what is reborn every moment can be said to be you. Personal identity involves a degree of continuity.”

— Terry Eagleton

If the oppressed must be alert enough to follow the rulers' instructions, they are therefore conscious enough to be able to challenge them.

— Terry Eagleton

To relate a Beethoven sonata to the testicles is hardly in the style of traditional aesthetics.

— Terry Eagleton

“I hope to show in the process that critical analysis can be fun, and in doing so help to demolish the myth that analysis is the enemy of enjoyment.”

— Terry Eagleton

“Once thought is pulled up short by a yearning that can only be known existentially, it is inevitable that conceptual discourse should give way to the birth of literature ...”

— Terry Eagleton

“But if we are not given his real name, then he does not have one.”

— Terry Eagleton

“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.”

— Terry Eagleton

“Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed.”

— Terry Eagleton

“In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.”

— Terry Eagleton

“Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.”

— Terry Eagleton

“It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?”

— Terry Eagleton

“The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

“The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable, too clearly a matter of politics rather than faith.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.

— Terry Eagleton

“The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.”

— Terry Eagleton

“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.”

— Terry Eagleton

“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.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

“For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.”

— Terry Eagleton

“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.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

“It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.”

— Terry Eagleton

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly not constructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

“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.”

— Terry Eagleton

“Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can't be used as a totem or fetish in that way.”

— Terry Eagleton

“Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

“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.”

— Terry Eagleton

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.

— Terry Eagleton

“Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.”

— Terry Eagleton