Terry Eagleton: Quotes about history

Terry Eagleton is British writer, academic and educator. Explore interesting quotes on history.
Terry Eagleton: 114   quotes 2   likes

“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)

Way , Travel , History , Knowledge

“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)

Love , Death , Truth , Religion

“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

History , Sense , Time

“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

Life , War , History , Time

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

Terry Eagleton

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

History

“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