Terry Eagleton Quotes

I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know.

If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

... politics of meaning

Foucault's genius is to go down to the little dramas, dress them in facts hardly anyone else has noticed, and turn these stage settings into clues to a hitherto un-thought series of confrontations out of which, he contends, the orderly structure of society is composed.

Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.

I want to put any number of assorted 'ists' - such as relativists, deconstructionists, destructivists, postmodernists, the more maudlin kind of pacifists and feminists - firmly in their place.

It seems to me that in our lifetime we have passed from the wreck of liberal humanism to the beginning of a new recognition of dogma: isn't it rather tremendous?

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.

I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.

I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods.

Postmodernists believe that truth is myth, and myth, truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology. The same people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It used to be called psychosis.

Sociological critics are waste makers.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to "truthiness." I am also someone who has been trained in deconstruction in the literary theory department of Yale University, so I am someone who is tempted to believe that no absolute truth is possible.

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time

Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.

It was titled 'Confirmation' very purposefully. I wanted the film to be about that process - about how Judge Thomas and Anita Hill were thrown into a situation that was difficult for anyone to navigate, no matter what the truth was. It's hard to know what the truth is.

As truth is Washington's worst enemy, everyone associated with the truth is Washington's enemy.

Truth is only a question of point of view.

The opposite of every truth is just as true.

If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.

The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.