Top 150 Terry Eagleton Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.”

— Terry Eagleton

2. “Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.”

— Terry Eagleton

3. “The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.”

— Terry Eagleton

4. “The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.”

— Terry Eagleton

5. “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

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6. “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

7. “The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the ‘human’ that present bourgeois society can muster.”

— Terry Eagleton

8. “After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.”

— Terry Eagleton

9. “Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.”

— Terry Eagleton

10. “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.”

— Terry Eagleton

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life.”

— Terry Eagleton

16. “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

17. “The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

20. “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.”

— Terry Eagleton

21. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

24. “People do evil things because they are evil. Some people are evil in the way that some things are coloured indigo. They commit their evil deeds not to achieve some goal, but just because of the sort of people they are.”

— Terry Eagleton

25. “Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.”

— Terry Eagleton

26. “That the death of God involves the death of Man, along with the birth of a new form of humanity, is orthodox Christian doctrine, a fact of which Nietzsche seems not to have been aware.”

— Terry Eagleton

27. “Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

31. “Poetry is concerned not just with the meaning of experience, but with the experience of meaning.”

— Terry Eagleton

32. “Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

34. “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.”

— Terry Eagleton

35. “We are not optimists; we do not present a lovely vision of the world which everyone is expected to fall in love with. We simply have, wherever we are, some small local task to do, on the side of justice, for the poor. – HERBERT MCCABE, OP.”

— Terry Eagleton

36. “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.”

— Terry Eagleton

37. “Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.”

— Terry Eagleton

38. “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

39. “Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.”

— Terry Eagleton

40. “Literary works quite often ‘know’ things that the reader does not know, or does not know yet, or perhaps will never know.”

— Terry Eagleton

41. “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.”

— Terry Eagleton

42. “Macbeth as a whole is awash with questions, sometimes questions responded to by another question, which helps to generate an atmosphere of uncertainty, anxiety and paranoid suspicion.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

44. “For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

46. “It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.”

— Terry Eagleton

47. “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.”

— Terry Eagleton

48. “If literature matters today, it is chiefly because it seems to many conventional critics one of the few remaining places where, in a divided, fragmented world, a sense of universal value may still be incarnate; and where, in a sordidly material world, a rare glimpse of transcendence can still be attained.”

— Terry Eagleton

49. “Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.”

— Terry Eagleton

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50. “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