Terry Eagleton

I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of…

— Terry Eagleton

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

— Terry Eagleton

“A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor,…

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and…

— Terry Eagleton

All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.

— Terry Eagleton

“Woman is the opposite, the ‘other’ of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the…

— 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

The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.

— Terry Eagleton

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

— Terry Eagleton

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

— 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…

— Terry Eagleton

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at…

— 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

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

— Terry Eagleton

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

— Terry Eagleton

The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable, too clearly…

— Terry Eagleton

“That Hitchens represents a grievous loss to the left is beyond doubt. He is a superb writer, superior in wit and elegance…

— Terry Eagleton

It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.

— Terry Eagleton

Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence…

— Terry Eagleton

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist…

— Terry Eagleton

It is silly to call fat people ''gravitationally challenged'' - a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom…

— Terry Eagleton

“On handing the book back to my friend, the woman inquired "Is he gay?" No, said my friend. The woman pondered for…

— Terry Eagleton

The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and…

— Terry Eagleton

There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.

— Terry Eagleton