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We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational.

Terry Eagleton

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Terry Eagleton
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 22
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Theorist
Non-Fiction Writer
Researcher
University Teacher
Writer
Salford
Greater Manchester
Form
Side
Spontaneous
Unreflective
Used
Doubt
Collective
Customary
Self
Sides
Rational
Wellbeing
Mean
Face
Reflection
Autonomy
Life
Faces
Passionate
Civilisation
Individual
Material
Ironic
Means
Materials
Collectives
Culture
Conflict
Irrational

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Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
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Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
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Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
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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.
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Nothing in human life is inherently private.
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
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Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
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It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?
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A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life.
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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.
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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.
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The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
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The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.
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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
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