Quotes from Terry Eagleton

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.

EÅŸit olanlar?n aras?ndakinin d???nda gerçek bir kar??l?kl?l?k olamayaca??ndan, bask? ve eÅŸitsizlik uzun vadede bir tür kendini engellemedir de.

A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the Modern Age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazy notion that a single global system known as the free-market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills.

One of the striking aspects of the lines is the way they make us see a tree, with its pattern of twigs, leaves and branches, as a visual image of the invisible roots of language.

An opinion is not to be respected simply because somebody holds it. More or less any obnoxious viewpoint one can think up is probably held by somebody somewhere. There are right-wing Afrikaners who believe that Nelson Mandela was evil.

You don't bring about major political change simply by changing people's minds. It's their interests that need to be assailed, not their opinions.

Marx was the first to identify the historical object known as capitalism - to show how it arose, by what laws it worked, and how it might be brought to an end. Rather as Newton discovered the invisible forces known as the laws of gravity, and Freud laid bare the workings of an invisible phenomenon known as the unconscious, so Marx unmasked our everyday life to reveal an imperceptible entity known as the capitalist mode of production.

Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family... urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class

It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this is in fact questionable.

Alienation, the 'commodification' of social life, a culture of greed, aggression, mindless hedonism and growing nihilism, the steady hemorrhage of meaning and value from human existence: it is hard to find an intelligent discussion of these questions that is not seriously indebted to the Marxist tradition.

People who are both powerful and dissatisfied are peculiarly dangerous.

Once thought is pulled up short by a yearning that can only be known existentially, it is inevitable that conceptual discourse should give way to the birth of literature...

An English Evangelical bishop wrote in 1991 that clear signs of Satanic possession included inappropriate laughter, inexplicable knowledge, a false smile, Scottish ancestry, relatives who have been coal miners, and the habitual choice of black for dress or car colour. None of this makes sense, but then that's how it is with evil. The less sense it makes, the more evil it is.

Middle paths in tragedy are in notably short supply.

When the Dublin-born Beckett was asked by a Parisian journalist whether he was English, he replied, 'On the contrary.

Morality has precious little to do with feeling in any case. The fact that you feel a surge of nausea at the sight of someone with half their head shot away is neither here nor there as long as you try to help them.

We do not know whether Melville's work is of universal interest because we have not reached the end of history yet, despite the best efforts of some of our political leaders.

the artist can never quite get on terms with God, who as far as creation goes has got there first and pulled off a product hard to beat.

If literature matters today, it is chiefly because it seems to many conventional critics one of the few remaining places where, in a divided, fragmented world, a sense of universal value may still be incarnate; and where, in a sordidly material world, a rare glimpse of transcendence can still be attained.

Poetry is concerned not just with the meaning of experience, but with the experience of meaning.

The interwovenness of our lives is the source of our solidarity. But it also lies at the root of our mutual harm.

But if we are not given his real name, then he does not have one.

revolutionary nationalism was by far the most successful radical tide of the the twentieth century.

As the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, revolution is not a runaway train; it is the application of the emergency brake. It is capitalism which is out of control, driven as it is by the anarchy of market forces, and socialism which attempts to reassert some collective mastery over this rampaging beast.