241 Quotes by Terry Eagleton

There is a document that records God's endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible.

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.

[A] great deal of what we believe we do not know firsthand; instead we have faith in the knowledge of specialists.

The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.

Alienation, the 'commodification' of social life, a culture of greed, aggression, mindless hedonism and growing nihilism, the steady hemorrhage of meaning and value from human existence: it is hard to find an intelligent discussion of these questions that is not seriously indebted to the Marxist tradition.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.

Goodness in the form of innocence can render you a pray to others. In a predatory world , it is not always easy to distinguish virtue from guillibility. This is one reason why there is something quaint as well as imposing about the word 'virtue'.

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.