Top 150 Terry Eagleton Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

53. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

55. “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

56. “Marx’s once scandalous thesis that governments are simple business agents for international capital is today an obvious fact.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

65. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

67. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

69. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

72. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

74. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

90. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic.”

— Terry Eagleton

98. “Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.”

— Terry Eagleton

99. “Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.”

— Terry Eagleton

100. “It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this is in fact questionable.”

— Terry Eagleton