Quote

Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

Terry Eagleton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Make
Crowded
Would
Giant
Like
Context
Giants
Constrictor
Wearing
Commuter
Train
Explicable
Evil
Unintelligible
Thing
Boarding

More quotes by Terry Eagleton

Image
Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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
Image
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
Terry Eagleton
Image
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Nothing in human life is inherently private.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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
Image
The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Terry Eagleton
Image
It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
Terry Eagleton
Image
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
Terry Eagleton
Image
If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
Terry Eagleton
Image
It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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.
Terry Eagleton
Image
The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
Terry Eagleton
Image
I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.
Terry Eagleton
Image
It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
Terry Eagleton
Image
For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
Terry Eagleton