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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

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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
Language
Correctness
Political
Challenged
Self
Symptoms
People
Righteous
Frustration
Fats
Silly
Fetishism
Call
Symptom

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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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Nothing in human life is inherently private.
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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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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
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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.
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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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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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In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.
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For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.
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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
Terry Eagleton
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Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.
Terry Eagleton
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The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.
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It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
Terry Eagleton
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There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
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The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.
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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.
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
Terry Eagleton