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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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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
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More quotes by Terry Eagleton
For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
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
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
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Terry Eagleton
Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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
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
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
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
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
Terry Eagleton
Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
Terry Eagleton
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
Terry Eagleton
The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Terry Eagleton
We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational.
Terry Eagleton
All communication involves faith indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
Terry Eagleton
The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
Terry Eagleton
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
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.
Terry Eagleton
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
Terry Eagleton
Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
Terry Eagleton