Quotes from Terry Eagleton

But it is precisely the fact that they are human that makes what terrorists do so appalling. If they really were inhuman, we might not be in the least surprised by their behaviour.

Capitalism's] newly pugnacious posture, like most forms of aggression, sprang from deep anxiety. If the system became manic, it was because it was latently depressed. What drove this reorganisation above all was the sudden fade-out of the postwar boom.

What Wittgenstein calls a 'grammar' is a set of rules by which we are able to make sense of things; and such grammars are not correlated with reality. It is not as though some of them provide us with a more accurate representation

The most uninspired form of criticism simply tells the story of a work in different words. Some students imagine they are writing criticism when for the most part they are simply paraphrasing a text, occasionally throwing in the odd comment of their own.

Many people, conservatives point out, grow up in dismal social conditions yet become law-abiding citizens. This is rather like arguing that because some smokers don't die of cancer, nobody who smokes dies of cancer.

Ends and origins are not inherent in the world. It is you, not the world, who calls the shots in this respect. Wherever you make a start, however, you may be sure that an enormous amount will have happend already. And whenever you call a halt, a great deal will carry on regardless.

The nearest one could approach to truth was to cultivate a suitably ironic sense of one's own phoniness.

If theory means a reasonably systematic reflection of our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable as ever.

To call ourselves historical beings is to say that we are constitutively capable of self-transcendence, becoming at one with ourselves only in death.

Those who can think up feminism or structuralism; those who can't apply such insights to Moby Dick or The Cat in the Hat.

Indeed, post-colonial theory first emerged in the wake of the failure of the Third World nations to go it alone. It marked the end of the era of Third World revolutions and the first glimmerings of what we now know as globalization.

Democracy] had to be local, popular and spread across all the institutions of civil society. It had to extend to economic as well as political life. The state Marx approved of was the rule of citizens over themselves, not of a minority over a majority.

What I admire about Austen (among hundreds of other commendable qualities) is her traditional rather than modern conception of morality. She sees it, as did Aristotle, Aquinas, and Marx, as a matter of public conduct, not as the inner light, interior emotions, what you happen to be feeling, what you find aesthetically alluring, and the like. She's an extremely tough-minded ethical realist in an increasingly corrupt, sentimentalist culture.

Devriminiz ad?na korkuyorum beyefendiciÄŸim; çünkü henüz uçar? olmay? öÄŸrenememiÅŸsiniz

Marx's aim was to close this gap between state and society, politics and everyday life, by dissolving the former into the latter. And this is what he called democracy. Men and women had to reclaim in their daily lives the powers that the state had appropriated from them. Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.

In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism.

Marxist theory itself is not just a commentary on the world, but an instrument for changing it.

It is the nature of capitalism to confound distinctions, collapse hierarchies and mix the most diverse forms of life promiscuously together.

If we do not act now, it seems that capitalism will be the death of us.

People do evil things because they are evil. Some people are evil in the way that some things are coloured indigo. They commit their evil deeds not to achieve some goal, but just because of the sort of people they are.

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.

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.

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.

Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.