Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton
Terence Francis "Terry" Eagleton FBA is a prominent British literary theorist, critic and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth22 February 1943
believe earth sun
It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
class working-class capitalism
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
believe government cabinets
The government spokesman announces that there is no truth in the charges of widespread corruption within the Cabinet; nobody believes him; he knows that nobody believes him, we know that he knows it, and he knows it too.
self superstitions improvement
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.
believe thinking culture
A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life.
long actors lines
You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!
silly frustration self
It is silly to call fat people ''gravitationally challenged'' - a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
literary-theory marxism trade
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
thinking too-much nostalgia
What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
art needs sensitive
Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
reading space enabling
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.
responsibility media life-is
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.
way totems yahweh
Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.
mistake struggle men
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.