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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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
Renew
Bury
Present
Past
Used
More quotes by Terry Eagleton
If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
Terry Eagleton
It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
Terry Eagleton
Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.
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
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
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
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.
Terry Eagleton
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.
Terry Eagleton
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Terry Eagleton
In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
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
Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world
Terry Eagleton
Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Terry Eagleton
Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
Terry Eagleton
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
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
Terry Eagleton
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.
Terry Eagleton
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.
Terry Eagleton
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
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