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4973dc5 After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was. socialism inspirational inevitability apathy marxism capitalism resistance Terry Eagleton
514329b 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. socialism politics Terry Eagleton
cbc093d Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone's different needs. socialism equality social-justice marxism Terry Eagleton
e14f054 Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism. history politics historical-determinism apolitical apathy marxism determinism Terry Eagleton
25ee4a9 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. life dogmatism Terry Eagleton
c86104d Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness. zealousness Terry Eagleton
bd02045 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
c5d8f72 The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body. Terry Eagleton
055fe99 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 G.. Terry Eagleton
14764ef In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black. metaphysics Terry Eagleton
ea38497 Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves. politics marxism revolution Terry Eagleton
18c02b9 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. rationalism individualism tradition Terry Eagleton
3bbfd79 If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism. Terry Eagleton
40759be Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking. Terry Eagleton
1731a28 Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another. Terry Eagleton
aee7a56 We like to think of individuals as unique. Yet if this is true of everyone, then we all share the same quality, namely our uniqueness. What we have in common is the fact that we are all uncommon. Everybody is special, which means that nobody is. The truth, however, is that human beings are uncommon only up to a point. There are no qualities that are peculiar to one person alone. Regrettably, there could not be a world in which only one indi.. individuality Terry Eagleton
0d438db You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. Terry Eagleton
ca9254b 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. faith linguistics Terry Eagleton
5638ed2 We live in a world in which there is nothing that cannot be narrated, but nothing that needs to be either. Terry Eagleton
805032e Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage. Terry Eagleton
f1eeedd If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious wh.. meaning freudian-slips parapraxis lacan discourse unconscious psychoanalysis language consciousness failure Terry Eagleton
29db738 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 c.. faith religion life philosophy grand-narratives islamic-fundamentalism philosophical-scepticism western-world western-culture metaphysics islamic-terrorism belief capitalism islam islamism pragmatism postmodernism Terry Eagleton
17f6684 A] great deal of what we believe we do not know firsthand; instead we have faith in the knowledge of specialists. knowledge Terry Eagleton
c70c4f6 It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures. future criticisms-of-marxism futures-exchange utopianism marxism capitalism Terry Eagleton
420ff9c 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. Terry Eagleton
ef91a53 The imagination is also sometimes commended for offering us in vicarious form experiences which we are unable to enjoy at first hand. If you can't afford an air ticket to Kuala Lumpur, you can always read Conrad and imagine yourself in South-East Asia. If you have been monotonously married for forty years, you can always lay furtive hands on a copy of James Joyce's letters. Literature on this view is a kind of supplement to our unavoidably .. Terry Eagleton
e0b40ef Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They are sometimes spoken of by him as the 'Other' -- as that which like language is always anterior to us and will always escape us, that which brought us into being as subjects in the first place but which always outruns our grasp. We have seen that for Lacan our unconscious desire is directed toward.. otherness psychonanlysis the-symbolic lacan unconscious the-other language Terry Eagleton
ecc9ffb 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 sky Like 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 traditiona.. Terry Eagleton
499cac4 It is always reassuring to discover that great writers are as fallible as oneself. W.B. Yeats once failed to obtain an academic post in Dublin because he misspelt the word 'professor' on his application. Terry Eagleton
eab9cb3 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 struct.. meaning truth derrida deconstruction relativism language Terry Eagleton
ef75f05 The theatre can teach us some truth, but it is the truth of the illusory nature of our existence. It can alert us to the dream-like quality of our lives, their brevity, mutability and lack of solid grounds. As such, by reminding us of our mortality, it can foster in us the virtue of humility. Terry Eagleton
26feb63 A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momentarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do.. poetry Terry Eagleton
b4c916d Enjoyment is more subjective than evaluation. Whether you prefer peaches to pears is a question of taste, which is not quite true of whether you think Dostoevsky a more accomplished novelist than John Grisham. Dostoevsky is better than Grisham in the sense that Tiger Woods is a better golfer than Lady Gaga. lady-gaga john-grisham Terry Eagleton
daa8a62 It is said that an eighteenth-century bishop who read Jonathan Swift's novel threw the book into the fire, indignantly declaring that he didn't believe a word of it. He obviously thought that the story was meant to be true, but suspected that it was invented. Which, of course, is just what it is. The bishop was dismissing the fiction because he thought it was fiction. Terry Eagleton
cfee841 All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens--a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins--is talking out of the back of his neck. Terry Eagleton
dc779dc Literary figures have no pre-history. It is said that a theatre director who was staging one of Harold Pinter's plays asked the playwright for some hints as to what his characters were up to before they came on stage. Pinter's reply was 'Mind your own fucking business. Terry Eagleton
35cb4e2 Deconstruction... insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional. Terry Eagleton
9414ece It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it. Terry Eagleton
9c1f1df Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry. Terry Eagleton
077f3ad All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill. Terry Eagleton
33c35fb Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure. Terry Eagleton
7c9c993 What perished in the Soviet Union was Marxist only in the sense that the Inquisition was Christian" Terry Eagleton
7500e97 History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic. Terry Eagleton
d3af0b0 The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does. Terry Eagleton
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