Terry Eagleton Quotes (9 Quotes)

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons -- reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.

Chaucer was a class traitor Shakespeare hated the mob Donne sold out a bit later Sidney was a nob.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space . . .

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place . . .

It is silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged - a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.