The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach. — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does. — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being takes… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly not constructive. For if the… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“What it means to be a ‘better person’, then, must be concrete and practical — that is to say, concerned with people’s political situations… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“What we consume now is not objects or events, but our experience of them. Just as we never need to leave our cars, so… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“The theatre can teach us some truth, but it is the truth of the illusory nature of our existence. It can alert us to… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
