241 Quotes by Terry Eagleton

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.

Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another.

There is little opiate delusion in Jesus’s grim warning to his comrades that if they were true to his Gospel of love and justice, they would meet the same sticky end as him. The measure of your love in his view is whether they kill you or not.

It is worth noting in this respect that the original proletariat was not the blue-collar male working class. It was lower-class women in ancient society. The word “proletariat” comes to us from the Latin word for “offspring,” meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but their wombs.

The words “I love you” are always at some level a quotation. All language is generalising, including words like “this,” “here,” “unique,” “right now,” and “my utterly special little sweetheart.” The word “individual” originally mean “indivisible,” meaning that to be a person was to be a part of a greater whole. There could never be simply one person, any more than there could simply be one letter or one number.

I hope to show in the process that critical analysis can be fun, and in doing so help to demolish the myth that analysis is the enemy of enjoyment.

I attacked Dawkins’s book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.

One of the striking aspects of the lines is the way they make us see a tree, with its pattern of twigs, leaves and branches, as a visual image of the invisible roots of language.

Marx’s once scandalous thesis that governments are simple business agents for international capital is today an obvious fact.