Top 150 Terry Eagleton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.”

— Terry Eagleton

52. “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

53. “The words “I love you” are always at some level a quotation. All language is generalising, including words like “this,” “here,” “unique,” “right now,” and “my utterly special little sweetheart.” The word “individual” originally mean “indivisible,” meaning that to be a person was to be a part of a greater whole. There could never be simply one person, any more than there could simply be one letter or one number.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

55. “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

56. “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

57. “One of the striking aspects of the lines is the way they make us see a tree, with its pattern of twigs, leaves and branches, as a visual image of the invisible roots of language.”

— Terry Eagleton

58. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

60. “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is ‘The Book of British Birds,’ and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”

— Terry Eagleton

61. “All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

64. “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.”

— Terry Eagleton

65. “Characters may lend the action a certain colouring, but it is what happens that comes first. To overlook this while watching a tragedy would be like treating a football game simply as the acts of a set of solitary individuals, or as chance for each of them to display ‘personality’. The fact that some players behave as though this is precisely what football games are about should not distract us from this point.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

67. “The liberal state has no view on whether witchcraft is more valuable than all-in wrestling. Like a tactful publican, it has as few opinions as possible. Many liberals suspect passionate convictions are latently authoritarian. But liberalism should surely be a passionate conviction. Liberals are not necessarily lukewarm. Only the more macho leftist suspects that they have no balls. You can be ardently neutral, and fiercely indifferent.”

— Terry Eagleton

68. “Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.”

— Terry Eagleton

69. “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

70. “Literary works are pieces of rhetoric as well as reports. They demand a peculiarly vigilant kind of reading, one which is alert to tone, mood, pace, genre, syntax, grammar, texture, rhythm, narrative structure, punctuation, ambiguity – in fact to everything that comes under the heading of ‘form’.”

— Terry Eagleton

71. “Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.”

— Terry Eagleton

72. “Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.”

— Terry Eagleton

73. “Alienation, the ‘commodification’ of social life, a culture of greed, aggression, mindless hedonism and growing nihilism, the steady hemorrhage of meaning and value from human existence: it is hard to find an intelligent discussion of these questions that is not seriously indebted to the Marxist tradition.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

75. “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.”

— Terry Eagleton

76. “An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

78. “History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

80. “You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. It indicates that the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon that it is.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

84. “Most of the reforms we now regard as precious features of liberal society – universal suffrage, free universal education, freedom of the press, trade unions and so on – were won by popular struggle in the teeth of ferocious ruling-class resistance.”

— Terry Eagleton

85. “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.”

— Terry Eagleton

86. “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.”

— Terry Eagleton

87. “Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.”

— Terry Eagleton

88. “If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.”

— Terry Eagleton

89. “An English Evangelical bishop wrote in 1991 that clear signs of Satanic possession included inappropriate laughter, inexplicable knowledge, a false smile, Scottish ancestry, relatives who have been coal miners, and the habitual choice of black for dress or car colour. None of this makes sense, but then that’s how it is with evil. The less sense it makes, the more evil it is.”

— Terry Eagleton

90. “The most compelling confirmation of Marx’s theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.”

— Terry Eagleton

91. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

93. “The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.”

— Terry Eagleton

94. “I attacked Dawkins’s book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.”

— Terry Eagleton

95. “You don’t bring about major political change simply by changing people’s minds. It’s their interests that need to be assailed, not their opinions.”

— Terry Eagleton

96. “All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is ‘pointing towards’ some object.”

— Terry Eagleton

97. “Capitalism, too, ws forged in blood and tears; it is just that it has survived long enough to forget about much of this horror.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

99. “Evil may be ‘unscientific’ but so is a song or a smile.”

— Terry Eagleton

100. “It is capitalism that sees production as potentially infinite, and socialism that sets it in the context of moral and aesthetic values. Or as Marx himself puts it in the first volume of Capital, “under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race.”

— Terry Eagleton