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?

Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology and women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault.

Progress, the religion of those who have none.

It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.

Liberals hate religion because politics is a religion substitute for liberals and they can't stand the competition.

A liberal is a person who sees a fourteen-year-old girl performing sex acts onstage and wonders if she's being paid minimum wage.

Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah.

There must be a way of promoting human values without involving religion, based on common sense, experience and recent scientific findings.

The critique of the highest values hitherto does not simply refute them or declare them invalid. It is rather a matter of displaying their origins as impositions which must affirm precisely what ought to be negated by the values established.

All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.

To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.

Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.

Hypostatized into a ritual pattern, Marxian theory becomes ideology. But its content and function distinguish it from classical forms of ideology; it is not false consciousness, but a rather consciousness of falsehood, a falsehood which is corrected in the context of the higher truth represented by the objective historical interest.

Women, children, Tyroleans and preachers want to create a new kingdom of God, but the God of their kingdom looks like women, children, preachers, and Tyrolians.

The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of--career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle.

It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institutions of private property.

The only religion that still demands human sacrifice is nationalism.

I don't believe in God. So I'm a non-believer in the non-visible. I'm a believer in us; in humans.

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.

Hypocrisy is the characteristic feature of the dying bourgeois epoch.

Liberalism, conservatism, that's irrelevant stuff to Trump. He looks at things in an entirely different way. This is a reason why we, as conservatives, have to remain vigilant as we can to the ideological component of what's going on here, because as it succeeds, we need to be able to tell people why it's working and at the same time be able to contrast and say why it didn't work when the liberals ran the show. This is an ongoing effort.

In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary.

I would define myself as a Marxian, and that means of course also as a humanist.

All films are political, whether they mean to be or not. Star Wars is political. As soon as you have conflict, which is the key to most films, you have politics. It's just that some are more artful with the handling of politics than others.