Terry Eagleton Quotes

87 quotes in 1463 categories

• It is silly to call fat people ''gravitationally challenged'' - a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
• From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense…
• [F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably…
• Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.
• It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
• Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
• An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our…
• You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
• The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it…
• Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
• What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how…
• Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.
• Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
• 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…
• All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly not constructive. For if the complex…
• 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…
• In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public…
• People do evil things because they are evil. Some people are evil in the way that some things are coloured indigo. They commit their evil…
• Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
• What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.

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