Terry Eagleton Quotes

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?

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

The history of storytelling isn't one of simply entertaining the masses but of also advising, instructing, challenging the status quo.

It did not occur to us that the Marxists' solution was fraudulent or that their vision was distorted, that whatever the wrongs in our society it was not the ideology of theirs that will cure them.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Sociological critics are waste makers.

... politics of meaning

What I have been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism.

The revision of any kind of established model is always a political act.

There is a buffet of ideologies for me to choose from. I've been a fan of certain communist and socialist ideals. Some have failed, some have succeeded. I've lived long enough to understand where all they failed.

Marxism is a success because it fuses the two inconsistent strains in Western thought - moral skepticism and moral indignation - and makes them complements in the attack against existing society.

Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.

All I wanted was to say honestly to people: 'Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!' The important thing is that people should realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves. I will not live to see it, but I know that it will be quite different, quite unlike our present life. And so long as this different life does not exist, I shall go on saying to people again and again: 'Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!'

Insofar as the universities are free and independent, they will also be "subversive," in the sense that dominant structures of power and their ideological support will be subjected to challenge and critique, a counterpart to attitudes that are fostered in the hard sciences wherever they are taken seriously.

It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change.

The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.

Progress, the religion of those who have none.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

Don't you get the idea I'm one of those goddam radicals. Don't get the idea I'm knocking the American system.

[Critical social science attempts] to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed.

I love radical theorists. But at the same time, I don't agree with them a lot, but I love their theories. I love how they intellectualize rage, and this inner battle that such a tiny percent of people really care about. I find that the most interesting.

The minimum necessary structuring ingredient of every ideology is to distance itself from another ideology, to denounce its other as ideology.

The importance of the Beats is twofold: first, they act out a critique of the organized system that everybody in some sense agrees with. But second-and more important in the long run-they are a kind of major pilot study of the use of leisure in an economy of abundance.

The two most far-reaching critical theories at the beginning of the latest phase of industrial society were those of Marx and Freud. Marx showed the moving powers and the conflicts in the social-historical process. Freud aimed at the critical uncovering of the inner conflicts. Both worked for the liberation of man, even though Marx's concept was more comprehensive and less time-bound than Freud's.