Terry Eagleton Quotes

87 quotes in 1463 categories

• There is an insuperable problem about introducing immigrants to British values. There are no British values. Nor are there any Serbian or Peruvian values. No…
• With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of…
• To declare in St John's words that Jesus and the Father are one is to claim that Jesus's dependence on the Other is not self-estrangement…
• Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of…
• The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds.…
• Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.
• We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and…
• Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no…
• One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but…
• There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of…
• Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted…
• Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
• God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
• Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being takes practice;…
• Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do.
• Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
• For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
• I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.
• I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.
• I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

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