Terry Eagleton Quotes

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.

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

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

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

Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.

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

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.

It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.

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

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

History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.

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

What perished in the Soviet Union was Marxist only in the sense that the Inquisition was Christian

Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.

Chaucer was a class traitor
Shakespeare hated the mob
Donne sold out a bit later
Sidney was a nob.