241 Quotes by Terry Eagleton

If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century – revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle – place culture at their heart.

It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this is in fact questionable.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is ‘The Book of British Birds,’ and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

When the Dublin-born Beckett was asked by a Parisian journalist whether he was English, he replied, ‘On the contrary.

Marx was the first to identify the historical object known as capitalism – to show how it arose, by what laws it worked, and how it might be brought to an end. Rather as Newton discovered the invisible forces known as the laws of gravity, and Freud laid bare the workings of an invisible phenomenon known as the unconscious, so Marx unmasked our everyday life to reveal an imperceptible entity known as the capitalist mode of production.

Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union.

People who are both powerful and dissatisfied are peculiarly dangerous.

Most of the reforms we now regard as precious features of liberal society – universal suffrage, free universal education, freedom of the press, trade unions and so on – were won by popular struggle in the teeth of ferocious ruling-class resistance.