Terry Eagleton QUOTES

121 " To be outside any situation whatsoever is known as being dead. "

― Terry Eagleton , How to Read Literature

123 " The idea that literary theorists killed poetry dead because with their shrivelled hearts and swollen brains they are incapable of spotting a metaphor, let alone a tender feeling, is on of the more obtuse critical platitudes of our time. "

― Terry Eagleton , How to Read a Poem

125 " Just as it looks as though the sun moves round the earth, so ordinary language seems to invert the relations between signifiers and signifieds, or words and their meanings. In everyday speech, it seems as though the word is simply the obedient transmitter of the meaning. It is as though it evaporates into it. If language did not conceal its operations in this way, we might be so enraptured by its music that, like the Lotus Eaters, we would never get anything done - rather as for Nietzsche, if we were mindful of the appalling butchery which produced civilised humanity, we would never get out of bed. Ordinary language, like history for Nietzsche or the ego for Freud, operates by a kind of salutary amnesia or repression. Poetry is the kind of writing which stands this inversion of form and content, or signifier and signified, on its feet again. It makes it hard for us to brush aside the words to get at the meanings. It makes it clear that the signified is the result of a complex play of signifiers. And in doing so, it allows us to experience the very medium of our experience. "

― Terry Eagleton , How to Read a Poem

127 " One thinks of the flamboyant student slogan of Paris 1968: ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible!’’ For all its hyperbole, the slogan is accurate enough. What is realistically needed to repair society is beyond the powers of the prevailing system, and in that sense is impossible. But it is realistic to believe that the world could in principle be greatly improved. Those who scoff at the idea that major social change is possible are full-blown fantasists. The true dreamers are those who deny that anything more than piecemeal change can ever come about. "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

129 " It is capitalism that sees production as potentially infinite, and socialism that sets it in the context of moral and aesthetic values. Or as Marx himself puts it in the first volume of Capital, “under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race. "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

131 " Baa Baa Black Sheep’ makes Marx’s Capital look like Mary Poppins. "

― Terry Eagleton , How to Read Literature

133 " ...it is most certainly Christianity itself which is primarily responsible for the intellectual sloppiness of its critics. Apart from the single instance of Stalinism, it is hard to think of a historical movement that has more squalidly betrayed its own revolutionary origins...For the most part, it has become the creed of the suburban well-to-do, not the astonishing promise offered to the riffraff and undercover anti-colonial militants with whom Jesus himself hung out...This brand of piety is horrified by the sight of a female breast, but considerably less appalled by the obscene inequalities between rich and poor. "

― Terry Eagleton