Terry Eagleton quotes

Terry Eagleton is a British literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual, recognized for his influential work in literary theory and cultural criticism. His writings explore topics such as Marxism, ideology, and the role of literature in society. He has authored many notable books that have shaped contemporary critical thought. Here are 127 of his quotes:

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

Terry Eagleton

Deconstruction... insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

Terry Eagleton

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Terry Eagleton

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

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.

Terry Eagleton

The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.

Terry Eagleton

Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us. The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.

Terry Eagleton

Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.

Terry Eagleton

What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism.

Terry Eagleton

It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.

Terry Eagleton

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.

Terry Eagleton

It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.

Terry Eagleton

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

Terry Eagleton

If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.

Terry Eagleton

There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.

Terry Eagleton

Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.

Terry Eagleton

We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population and endless deferment of fulfillment.

Terry Eagleton

Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.

Terry Eagleton

If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.

Terry Eagleton

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

Terry Eagleton

All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.

Terry Eagleton

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

Terry Eagleton