241 Quotes by Terry Eagleton

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. It indicates that the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon that it is.

Middle paths in tragedy are in notably short supply.

A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the Modern Age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazy notion that a single global system known as the free-market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills.

To be outside any situation whatsoever is known as being dead.

Revolution cannot be handed down to you by a tight-knit vanguard of conspirators. Nor, as Lenin insisted, can it be carried abroad and imposed at the point of a bayonet, as Stalin did in eastern Europe. You have to be actively involved in the making of it yourself, unlike the kind of artist who instructs his assistants to go off and pickle a shark in his name.

The interwovenness of our lives is the source of our solidarity. But it also lies at the root of our mutual harm.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'