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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Terry Eagleton Quotes

If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.

– Terry Eagleton

Americans use the word ‘dream’ as often as psychoanalysts do.

– Terry Eagleton

For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.

– Terry Eagleton

The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century – revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle – place culture at their heart.

– Terry Eagleton

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.

– Terry Eagleton

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

Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.

– Terry Eagleton

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

– Terry Eagleton

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

– Terry Eagleton

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.

– Terry Eagleton

It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.

– Terry Eagleton

The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

– Terry Eagleton

Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.

– Terry Eagleton

Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

– Terry Eagleton

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

– Terry Eagleton

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

– Terry Eagleton

Nothing in human life is inherently private.

– Terry Eagleton

Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic.

– Terry Eagleton

Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.

– Terry Eagleton

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

– Terry Eagleton

Real men study law and engineering, while ideas and values are for sissies. The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.

– Terry Eagleton

I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.

– Terry Eagleton

There is an insuperable problem about introducing immigrants to British values. There are no British values. Nor are there any Serbian or Peruvian values. No nation has a monopoly on fairness and decency, justice and humanity.

– Terry Eagleton

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

Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.

– Terry Eagleton

It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?

– Terry Eagleton

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

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.’

– Terry Eagleton

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

– Terry Eagleton

In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.

– Terry Eagleton

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