Terry Eagleton

Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.

— Terry Eagleton

Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.

— Terry Eagleton

“Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.”

— Terry Eagleton

“[God] is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason.”

— Terry Eagleton

Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do.

— Terry Eagleton

Nothing in human life is inherently private.

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

— Terry Eagleton

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.

— Terry Eagleton

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.

— Terry Eagleton

“Baa Baa Black Sheep’ makes Marx’s Capital look like Mary Poppins .”

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

“We live in a world in which there is nothing that cannot be narrated, but nothing that needs to be either.”

— Terry Eagleton

I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

“[A] great deal of what we believe we do not know firsthand; instead we have faith in the knowledge of specialists.”

— Terry Eagleton

“The idea that literary theorists killed poetry dead because with their shrivelled hearts and swollen brains they are incapable of spotting a…

— Terry Eagleton

Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy…

— Terry Eagleton

“Literary figures have no pre-history. It is said that a theatre director who was staging one of Harold Pinter's plays asked the…

— Terry Eagleton

Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments…

— Terry Eagleton

The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society…

— Terry Eagleton

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they…

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

“Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists. In this respect, being a Marxist is nothing like being a Buddhist or…

— Terry Eagleton

“[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and…

— Terry Eagleton

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you…

— Terry Eagleton

“Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry,…

— Terry Eagleton

“It is said that an eighteenth-century bishop who read Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels threw the book into the fire, indignantly declaring…

— Terry Eagleton

“The words "I love you" are always at some level a quotation. All language is generalising, including words like "this," "here," "unique,"…

— Terry Eagleton

In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But…

— Terry Eagleton

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand…

— Terry Eagleton

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one…

— Terry Eagleton

“To call for close reading, in fact, is to do more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests…

— Terry Eagleton

“The ‘healthy’ sign, for Barthes, is one which draws attention to its own arbitrariness—which does not try to palm itself off as…

— Terry Eagleton

“Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They…

— Terry Eagleton

“Just as it looks as though the sun moves round the earth, so ordinary language seems to invert the relations between signifiers…

— Terry Eagleton

“In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with…

— Terry Eagleton

“...it is most certainly Christianity itself which is primarily responsible for the intellectual sloppiness of its critics. Apart from the single instance…

— Terry Eagleton

“We like to think of individuals as unique. Yet if this is true of everyone, then we all share the same quality,…

— Terry Eagleton

“There is, in fact, no need to drag politics into literary theory: as with South African sport, it has been there from…

— Terry Eagleton