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“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

“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

“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.

“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.

“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

“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

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

Terry Eagleton

Source: Why Marx Was Right

“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

“Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.”

Terry Eagleton

Source: Why Marx Was Right

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

Terry Eagleton

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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