Terry Eagleton
I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.
I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.
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.
What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.
I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.Collection: Literary Theory
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Reading
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 arational.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Abhorrent
Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.Collection: Democracy
[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.Collection: Soccer
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.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Degrees
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.Collection: Sick
All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.Collection: Spring
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.Collection: Literary Theory
The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.Collection: Mistake
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 .Collection: Literary Theory
The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.Collection: Names
Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.Collection: Literary Theory
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.Collection: Logic
If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.Collection: Law
Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.Collection: Dream
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.Collection: Political
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.Collection: Everyday
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.Collection: Communication
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.Collection: Song
Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.Collection: Yahweh
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.Collection: Moving
Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.Collection: Waiting
To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.Collection: Jesus
If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.Collection: Literary Theory
It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.Collection: Important
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.Collection: Literary Theory
As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faithCollection: Light
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.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Communication
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.Collection: Literature
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.Collection: Odds
Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Becoming
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.Collection: School
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.Collection: Mistake
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.Collection: Past