Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton Quotes
58 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
To declare in St John's words that Jesus and the Father are one is to claim that Jesus's dependence on the Other is not self-estrangement but self-ful lment. At the core of his identity..lies nothing but unconditional love.
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us. The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
When it comes to who exactly should be exploited, the system is admirably egalitarian.
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
What perished in the Soviet Union was Marxist only in the sense that the Inquisition was Christian
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism.
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
We face a probable future of nuclear-armed states warring over a scarcity of resources; and that scarcity is largely the consequence of capitalism itself. For the first time in history, our prevailing form of life has the power not simply to breed racism and spread cultural cretinism, drive us into war or herd us into labour camps, but to wipe us from the planet. Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism. The traditional leftist slogan ''Socialism or barbarism'' was never more grimly apposite.
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the 'imaginary' level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it.
Terry Eagleton
Source
Report...
"In some traditionalist universities not long ago, you could not research on authors who were still alive. This was a great incentive to slip a knife between their ribs one foggy evening, or a remarkable test of patience if your chosen novelist was in rude health and only 34".
Terry Eagleton
1
2
3
Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Terry Eagleton
Creative Commons
Born:
February 22, 1943
(age 81)
Bio:
Terence Francis "Terry" Eagleton is a prominent British literary theorist, critic and public intellectual.
Known for:
Literary theory (1983)
Why Marx Was Right (2011)
After theory (2003)
Culture and the Death of God (2014)
How to Read Literature (2013)
Most used words:
capitalism
history
language
sense
literary
human
literature
theory
capitalist
truth
subject
inevitable
time
simple
complex
Terry Eagleton on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Terry Eagleton Quotes
Terry Eagleton Short Quotes
British Academic Quotes
Academic Quotes
20th-century Academic Quotes
Related People
Karl Marx
German Philosopher
Raymond Williams
British Philosopher
Slavoj Žižek
Slovenian Philosopher
Louis Althusser
French Philosopher
Fredric Jameson
American Academic
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes