Terry Eagleton Quotes

87 quotes in 1463 categories

• You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!
• A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness,…
• Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it…
• Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics…
• For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.
• I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how…
• I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is…
• In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the…
• Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in…
• It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity.…
• It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the…
• It is true that some liberals and humanists, along with the laid-back Danes, deny the existence of evil. This is largely because they regard the…
• Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's…
• Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust…
• Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around…
• The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of…
• The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable, too clearly a matter of…
• The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the…
• The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their…
• The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those…

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