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Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.

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
Political
Shaped
Form
Demands
Life
Forms
Identity
Demand
Terms
Term
Language
Voiced

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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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In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.
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God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
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Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.
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To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.
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Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.
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It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
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History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
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The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
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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.
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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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Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.
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Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.
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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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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
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Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
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Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being takes practice and those who are brilliant at being human (what Christians call the saints) are the virtuosi of the moral sphere - the Pavarottis and Maradonas of virtue.
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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.
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