Terry Eagleton Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

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

Terry Eagleton
Chaucer was a class traitor
Shakespeare hated the mob
Donne sold out a bit later
Sidney was a nob.

Terry Eagleton
Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.

Terry Eagleton
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Terry Eagleton
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Terry Eagleton
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.

Terry Eagleton
Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions.

Terry Eagleton
All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

Terry Eagleton