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Terry Eagleton Quotes

Terence Francis "Terry" Eagleton FBA is a British literary theorist, critic and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.

Eagleton has published over forty books, but remains best known for Literary Theory: An Introduction , which has sold over 750,000 copies. The work elucidated the emerging literary theory of the period. He has also been a prominent critic of postmodernism, publishing works such as The Illusions of Postmodernism .

Formerly the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester , Eagleton has held visiting appointments at universities around the world including Cornell, Duke, Iowa, Melbourne, Trinity College in Dublin, and Yale.

Eagleton delivered Yale University's 2008 Terry Lectures and the University of Edinburgh's 2010 Gifford Lecture entitled The God Debate. He gave the 2010 Richard Price Memorial Lecture at Newington Green Unitarian Church, speaking on "The New Atheism and the War on Terror". In 2009, he published a book which accompanied his lectures on religion, entitled Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.

✵ 22. February 1943
Terry Eagleton photo
Terry Eagleton: 57   quotes 2   likes

Famous Terry Eagleton Quotes

“Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 7, p. 177

“Deconstruction… insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.”

Terry Eagleton

Frère Jacques: The Politics of Deconstruction, ch. 6, Against the Grain (1984)
1980s

“Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: Why Marx Was Right

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

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 1, p. 6

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

Terry Eagleton

Source: Why Marx Was Right

“A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: Ideology: An Introduction

Terry Eagleton Quotes about history

“Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions.”

Terry Eagleton

2000s, After Theory (2003)

“If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.”

Terry Eagleton

Afterword, p. 190
1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

“Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 2, p. 12

“History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 3, p. 44

“We face a probable future of nuclear-armed states warring over a scarcity of resources; and that scarcity is largely the consequence of capitalism itself. For the first time in history, our prevailing form of life has the power not simply to breed racism and spread cultural cretinism, drive us into war or herd us into labour camps, but to wipe us from the planet. Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism. The traditional leftist slogan ‘‘Socialism or barbarism’’ was never more grimly apposite.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 1, p. 8

“The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 5, p. 115

Terry Eagleton Quotes about reason

“What perished in the Soviet Union was Marxist only in the sense that the Inquisition was Christian”

Terry Eagleton

2000s, Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition Marxism and Literary Theory (2002)

“It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.”

Terry Eagleton

1990s, Ideology (1991)

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

Terry Eagleton

Afterword, p. 190
1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

“In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it.”

Terry Eagleton

(2011) Literary Theory: An Introduction. p. 147
2010s

“Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 5, p. 138

Terry Eagleton: Trending quotes

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

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 2, p. 48

“Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 2, p. 64-65

“Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.”

Terry Eagleton

Introduction: What is Literature?, p. 2
1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
Context: 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 of quietness," then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Literature

Terry Eagleton Quotes

“Reading is not a straightforward linear movement,”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 2, p. 67 (See also: Northrop Frye)
Context: Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.

Reading

“If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: The Meaning of Life

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

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 4, p. 65

Future

“As opposed to science ideology has the precise function of hiding the real contradictions and of reconstituting on an imaginary level a relatively coherent discourse which serves as the horizon of agents' experience.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1990s, Ideology (1991), p. 136

Science

“I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U. S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller.”

Terry Eagleton

New Preface to Literary Theory: An Introduction, Anniversary Edition, (2008)
2000s

School , Business , Study

“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.”

Terry Eagleton

Guardian (October 27, 1992)
1990s

People

“The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 9, p. 197

“The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 4, p. 70

Truth , Feeling , Past , Future

“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 longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Against The Grain (1986), Ch. 13, The Revolt of the Reader

“It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 4, p. 114

Thinking

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

Terry Eagleton

Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism, ch. 9 (1985)
1980s

“The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.”

Terry Eagleton

Conclusion: political Criticism, p. 174
1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

Truth

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

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 4, p. 100

“In some traditionalist universities not long ago, you could not research on authors who were still alive. This was a great incentive to slip a knife between their ribs one foggy evening, or a remarkable test of patience if your chosen novelist was in rude health and only 34.”

Terry Eagleton

2000s, After Theory (2003)

Health , Universe , Patience

“Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us. The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 10, p. 236

“Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.”

Terry Eagleton

Guardian (October 27, 1992)
1990s

Way

“We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population and endless deferment of fulfillment.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 5, p. 167

“Ideology … is therefore necessarily false; its social function is not to give agents a true knowledge of the social structure but simply to insert them as it were into their practical activities.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1990s, Ideology (1991), p. 136

Knowledge , Falseness

“Ideology is present to such an extent in all the agents' activities that it becomes indistinguishable from their lived experience.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1990s, Ideology (1991), p. 136

“Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 5, p. 151

Waiting

“Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 4, p. 111

Reading

“Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 4, p. 113 (See also: Julian Jaynes)

Communication

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

Terry Eagleton

Preface, p. xi
2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011)

People

“If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 5, p. 131

Lie

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

Terry Eagleton

Conclusion: political Criticism, p. 172
1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

Failure

“Chaucer was a class traitor
Shakespeare hated the mob
Donne sold out a bit later
Sidney was a nob.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Against The Grain (1986), Ch. 14, The Ballad of English Literature

Hate

“All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 5, p. 145 (See also: Rene Girard)

Spring

“What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 3, 79

Dogs , Literature

“If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 1, p. 21

“When it comes to who exactly should be exploited, the system is admirably egalitarian.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 7, p. 162

“It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 4, p. 120

Literature

“All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Against The Grain (1986), Ch. 10, The Critic as Clown

“At the level of experience the social whole remains opaque to the agents.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1990s, Ideology (1991), p. 136

“The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 2, p. 62

Understanding , Past

“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 human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.”

Terry Eagleton

1990s, Ideology (1991)

Women , Men , God , Idea

“Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 6, p. 134

“Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 9, p. 202

Democracy

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