Quote

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

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
Look
Pay
Deeply
Utility
Looks
Literature
Delight
Guardian
Askance
Something
State
Tend
Attract
Pointlessness
Always
Idea
Obvious
Purely
Bearded
Like
History
Material
Grey
Rattled
Art
Notion
Capitalist
Guardians
States
Materials
Sheer
Subversive
Ideas
Subjects
Affair
Notions

More quotes by Terry Eagleton

Image
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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.
Terry Eagleton
Image
What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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.
Terry Eagleton
Image
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
Terry Eagleton
Image
From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.
Terry Eagleton
Image
The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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.
Terry Eagleton
Image
It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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
Image
Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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
Image
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.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
Terry Eagleton
Image
The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.
Terry Eagleton
Image
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Terry Eagleton