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“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

“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)

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

Terry Eagleton

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

“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)

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

Terry Eagleton

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

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

Terry Eagleton

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

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

Terry Eagleton

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

“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