Terry Eagleton Quotes

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political...

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up wi...

When they first emerged in their present shape around the turn of the 18th century, the so-called hu...

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

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attr...

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

The liberal state has no view on whether witchcraft is more valuable than all-in wrestling. Like a t...

Another anti-theoretical stratagem is to claim that in order to launch some fundamental critique of ...

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel say...

We like to think of individuals as unique. Yet if this is true of everyone, then we all share the sa...

Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, ...

If the oppressed must be alert enough to follow the rulers' instructions, they are therefore conscio...

A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who h...

An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits ...

In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the in...

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course ...

Marx was troubled by the question of why ancient Greek art retained an ‘eternal charm’, even though ...

Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: tha...

[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits...

What Althusser does… is to rethink the concept of ideology in terms of Lacan’s ‘imaginary’. For the ...

Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly syn...

Derrida… labels as ‘metaphysical’ any such thought system which depends on an unassailable foundatio...

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a lang...

There is, in fact, no need to drag politics into literary theory: as with South African sport, it ha...

In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and wi...

What it means to be a ‘better person’, then, must be concrete and practical — that is to say, concer...

Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive s...

In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big ...

Woman is the opposite, the ‘other’ of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negativ...

Even in the act of fleeing modern ideologies, however, literary theory reveals its often unconscious...

One criticism of Freud still sometimes heard on the political Left is that his thinking is individua...

Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional clos...

All of our descriptive statements move within an often invisible network of value-categories, and in...

All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to a...

The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregar...

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dea...

Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of soc...

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

... Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean h...

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different...

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

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

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-...

If literature matters today, it is chiefly because it seems to many conventional critics one of the ...

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoi...

Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But ...

Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhe...

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of t...

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack coca...

What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Ma...

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.

So there is nothing inherently subversive about pleasure. On the contrary, as Karl Marx recognized, ...

In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical...

The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, shoul...