241 Quotes by Terry Eagleton

We do not know whether Melville’s work is of universal interest because we have not reached the end of history yet, despite the best efforts of some of our political leaders.

An English Evangelical bishop wrote in 1991 that clear signs of Satanic possession included inappropriate laughter, inexplicable knowledge, a false smile, Scottish ancestry, relatives who have been coal miners, and the habitual choice of black for dress or car colour. None of this makes sense, but then that’s how it is with evil. The less sense it makes, the more evil it is.

The fascinating is only a step away from the freakish.

It is capitalism that sees production as potentially infinite, and socialism that sets it in the context of moral and aesthetic values. Or as Marx himself puts it in the first volume of Capital, “under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race.

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.

All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens – a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins – is talking out of the back of his neck.

Literary works are pieces of rhetoric as well as reports. They demand a peculiarly vigilant kind of reading, one which is alert to tone, mood, pace, genre, syntax, grammar, texture, rhythm, narrative structure, punctuation, ambiguity – in fact to everything that comes under the heading of ‘form’.

You don’t bring about major political change simply by changing people’s minds. It’s their interests that need to be assailed, not their opinions.

The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they’re winning. Then it moves in with its water hoses and paramilitary squads, and if these fail with its tanks.