1. Top Famous Quotes
    2. /
  2. Terry Eagleton Quotes

Top Terry Eagleton Quotes

Browse top 71 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Terry Eagleton.

Favorite Terry Eagleton Quotes

1. "Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to guarantee their truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to, that something useful is accomplished by making them, and so on." ~ Terry Eagleton
2. "All of our descriptive statements move within an often invisible network of value-categories, and indeed without such categories we would have nothing to say to each other at all. It is not just as though we have something called factual knowledge which may then be distorted by particular interests and judgements, although this is certainly possible; it is also that without particular interests we would have no knowledge at all, because we would not see the point of bothering to get to know anything. Interests are constitutive of our knowledge, not merely prejudices which imperil it. The claim that knowledge should be 'value-free' is itself a value-judgement." ~ Terry Eagleton
3. "Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile." ~ Terry Eagleton
4. "Derrida… labels as ‘metaphysical' any such thought system which depends on an unassailable foundation, a first principle or unimpeachable ground upon which a whole hierarchy of meanings may be constructed. It is not that he believes that we can merely rid ourselves of the urge to forge such first principles, for such an impulse is deeply embedded in our history, and cannot — at least as yet — be eradicated or ignored. Derrida would see his own work as inescapably ‘contaminated' by such metaphysical thought, much as he strives to give it the slip. But if you examine such first principles closely, you can see that they may always be ‘deconstructed': they can be shown to be products of a particular system of meaning, rather than what props it up from the outside." ~ Terry Eagleton
5. "Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves." ~ Terry Eagleton
6. "The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name." ~ Terry Eagleton
7. "It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures." ~ Terry Eagleton
8. "Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone's different needs." ~ Terry Eagleton
9. "[God] is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason." ~ Terry Eagleton
10. "An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns." ~ Terry Eagleton
11. "In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black." ~ Terry Eagleton
12. "In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism." ~ Terry Eagleton
13. "Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of ‘normality'. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud's own views on ‘normality' are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud's work showed, scandalously, just how ‘plastic' and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual ‘norm'; but this is in no sense given by Nature." ~ Terry Eagleton
14. "Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair." ~ Terry Eagleton
15. "I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate." ~ Terry Eagleton
16. "I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing." ~ Terry Eagleton
17. "It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health." ~ Terry Eagleton
18. "Nothing in human life is inherently private." ~ Terry Eagleton
19. "The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture." ~ Terry Eagleton
20. "In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith." ~ Terry Eagleton
21. "Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?" ~ Terry Eagleton
22. "Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking." ~ Terry Eagleton
23. "You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism." ~ Terry Eagleton
24. "The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress." ~ Terry Eagleton
25. "Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional." ~ Terry Eagleton
26. "God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong." ~ Terry Eagleton
27. "We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and irrational." ~ Terry Eagleton
28. "Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant." ~ Terry Eagleton
29. "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology." ~ Terry Eagleton
30. "For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human." ~ Terry Eagleton
31. "One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies." ~ Terry Eagleton
32. "Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being takes practice; and those who are brilliant at being human (what Christians call the saints) are the virtuosi of the moral sphere - the Pavarottis and Maradonas of virtue." ~ Terry Eagleton
33. "Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism." ~ Terry Eagleton
34. "After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was." ~ Terry Eagleton
35. "All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all." ~ Terry Eagleton
36. "Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees." ~ Terry Eagleton
37. "The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive." ~ Terry Eagleton
38. "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
39. "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
40. "Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love." ~ Terry Eagleton
41. "What we consume now is not objects or events, but our experience of them. Just as we never need to leave our cars, so we never need to leave our own skulls. The experience is already out there, as ready-made as a pizza, as bluntly objective as a boulder, and all we need to do is receive it. It is as though there is an experience hanging in the air, waiting for a human subject to come alone and have it. Niagara Falls, Dublin Castle and the Great Wall of China do our experiencing for us. They come ready-interpreted, thus saving us a lot of inconvenient labour. What matters is not the place itself but the act of consuming it. We buy an experience like we pick up a T-shirt." ~ Terry Eagleton
42. "... 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...." ~ Terry Eagleton
43. "The celebrated opening image of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is another case in point:Let us go then, you and I,When the evening is spread out against the skyLike a patient etherised upon a table...How, the reader wonders, can the evening look like an anaesthetised body? Yet the point surely lies as much in the force of this bizarre image as in its meaning. We are in a modern world in which settled correspondences or traditional affinities between things have broken down. In the arbitrary flux of modern experience, the whole idea of representation - of on thing predictably standing for another - has been plunged into crisis; and this strikingly dislocated image, one which more or less ushers in 'modern' poetry with a rebellious flourish, is a symptom of this bleak condition." ~ Terry Eagleton
44. "If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism." ~ Terry Eagleton
45. "Modern poets like Frost still want to make 'deep' statements; but they are also more sceptical of such high-sounding generalities than many of their forebears. So, rather like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, they gesture enigmatically to such profundities while at the same time being nervous of committing themselves to them." ~ Terry Eagleton
46. "What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods and vermin is ideology." ~ Terry Eagleton
47. "The artistic is thus very close to the ethical. If only we could grasp the world from someone else's standpoint, we would have a fuller sense of how and why they act as they do. We would thus be less inclined to reproach them from some loftily external point of view. To understand is to forgive." ~ Terry Eagleton
48. "One of the most moving narratives of modern history is the story of how men and women languishing under various forms of oppression came to acquire, often at great personal cost, the sort of technical knowledge necessary for them to understand their own condition more deeply, and so acquire some of the theoretical armoury essential to change it. ... There is no reason why literary critics should not turn to autobiography or anecdotalism, or simply slice up their texts and deliver them to their publishers in a cardboard box, if they are not so politically placed as to need emancipatory knowledge." ~ Terry Eagleton
49. "Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional closure' which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force. He is not seeking, absurdly, to deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, meanings, identities, intentions, historical continuities; he is seeking rather to see such things as the effects of a wider and deeper history of language, of the unconscious, of social institutions and practices." ~ Terry Eagleton
50. "[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region ‘inside' us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, ‘outside' rather than ‘within' us — or rather it exists ‘between' us, as our relationships do." ~ Terry Eagleton
First«12»Last

Terry Eagleton Quotes Pictures

Terry Eagleton Quotes
Terry Eagleton Quotes
Terry Eagleton Quotes

Today's Quote

I am happy that I have entertained people and made them happy."
Author: Aamir Khan

What Did Terry Eagleton Talk About?

Con
Lit
Thin
Per
Act
Era
Hum
Wit
Self
Ally
Hey
Use
Here
Ten
Able
Mean
Tie
Cat
Tan
Social
Sit
Thou
Son
Political
Whole
Sin
Rent
True
Hole
Call
Modern
Los
King
Hen
Lie
Once
Ear
Rather
Deep
End
Ways
Though
Term
State
Means
Speak
Ought
Sing
She
Read

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Copyright © 2023 Top Famous Quotes. All Rights Reserved. | New Quotes | Topic List | Author List | Privacy Policy | About Us | Contact Us |