Top 150 Terry Eagleton Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

104. “Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.”

— Terry Eagleton

105. “I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics – I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it’s more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.”

— Terry Eagleton

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106. “The interwovenness of our lives is the source of our solidarity. But it also lies at the root of our mutual harm.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

108. “Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

110. “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

111. “We do not know whether Melville’s work is of universal interest because we have not reached the end of history yet, despite the best efforts of some of our political leaders.”

— Terry Eagleton

112. “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

113. “Nothing in human life is inherently private.”

— Terry Eagleton

114. “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

115. “The government spokesman announces that there is no truth in the charges of widespread corruption within the Cabinet; nobody believes him; he knows that nobody believes him, we know that he knows it, and he knows it too.”

— Terry Eagleton

116. “Americans use the word ‘dream’ as often as psychoanalysts do.”

— Terry Eagleton

117. “A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momentarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do so immediately.”

— Terry Eagleton

118. “It is true that some liberals and humanists, along with the laid-back Danes, deny the existence of evil. This is largely because they regard the word ‘evil’ as a device for demonising those who are really nothing more than socially unfortunate.”

— Terry Eagleton

119. “Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world.”

— Terry Eagleton

120. “People who are both powerful and dissatisfied are peculiarly dangerous.”

— Terry Eagleton

121. “The fascinating is only a step away from the freakish.”

— Terry Eagleton

122. “You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.”

— Terry Eagleton

123. “Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees.”

— Terry Eagleton

124. “Morality has precious little to do with feeling in any case. The fact that you feel a surge of nausea at the sight of someone with half their head shot away is neither here nor there as long as you try to help them.”

— Terry Eagleton

125. “All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens – a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins – is talking out of the back of his neck.”

— Terry Eagleton

126. “If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.”

— Terry Eagleton

127. “Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.”

— Terry Eagleton

128. “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

129. “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.”

— Terry Eagleton

130. “Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.”

— Terry Eagleton

131. “Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.”

— Terry Eagleton

132. “To be outside any situation whatsoever is known as being dead.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

134. “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

135. “There is little opiate delusion in Jesus’s grim warning to his comrades that if they were true to his Gospel of love and justice, they would meet the same sticky end as him. The measure of your love in his view is whether they kill you or not.”

— Terry Eagleton

136. “Instead of seeking fulfilment in an object, the subject must acknowledge that it can flourish only through another of its kind. It is when two free, equal individuals engage in an act of mutual recognition that desire can transcend itself into something rather more edifying.”

— Terry Eagleton

137. “When the Dublin-born Beckett was asked by a Parisian journalist whether he was English, he replied, ‘On the contrary.”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

139. “Much of the media under capitalism avoid difficult, controversial or innovative work because it is bad for profits. Instead, they settle for banality, sensationalism and gut prejudice.”

— Terry Eagleton

140. “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

141. “Revolution cannot be handed down to you by a tight-knit vanguard of conspirators. Nor, as Lenin insisted, can it be carried abroad and imposed at the point of a bayonet, as Stalin did in eastern Europe. You have to be actively involved in the making of it yourself, unlike the kind of artist who instructs his assistants to go off and pickle a shark in his name.”

— Terry Eagleton

142. “You’ve got to have a sense of different audiences. I’m a kind of performer manque – I come from a long line of failed actors!”

— Terry Eagleton

143. “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

144. “A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the Modern Age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazy notion that a single global system known as the free-market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills.”

— Terry Eagleton

145. “Marx was the first to identify the historical object known as capitalism – to show how it arose, by what laws it worked, and how it might be brought to an end. Rather as Newton discovered the invisible forces known as the laws of gravity, and Freud laid bare the workings of an invisible phenomenon known as the unconscious, so Marx unmasked our everyday life to reveal an imperceptible entity known as the capitalist mode of production.”

— Terry Eagleton

146. “It is thus the adventure of poetry, not the closure of philosophy, that most truly reflects the human condition.”

— Terry Eagleton

147. “Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another.”

— Terry Eagleton

148. “I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.”

— Terry Eagleton

149. “It is worth noting in this respect that the original proletariat was not the blue-collar male working class. It was lower-class women in ancient society. The word “proletariat” comes to us from the Latin word for “offspring,” meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but their wombs.”

— Terry Eagleton

150. “Goodness in the form of innocence can render you a pray to others. In a predatory world, it is not always easy to distinguish virtue from guillibility. This is one reason why there is something quaint as well as imposing about the word ‘virtue’.”

— Terry Eagleton