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Terry Eagleton: 114 quotes2 likes

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

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

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

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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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)

“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

“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)

“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

“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)