Terry Eagleton
British · 1943–
British literary theorist and cultural critic whose witty and combative prose made Marxist and poststructuralist thought accessible to generations of readers.
Wikipedia ↗“Ideology, in short, is not a set of doctrines; it signifies the way men live out their roles in class-society, the values, ideas and images which tie them to their social functions and so prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole.”
English
“All propaganda or advocacy is a version of the faith that if you say something often enough, people will eventually come to believe it. Tragically, this has proved to be the case.”
English
“Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism, one which manages to preserve something of the form of its radicalism while gutting it entirely of content.”
English
“Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body. It crams our eyes with things to look at and dulls our capacity to see. It destroys our sense of smell with pollution and our sense of taste with processed food.”
English
“Tragedy is about the fact that there are situations from which there is no way out. This does not mean that tragedy counsels despair. On the contrary, it shows us how human beings confront the worst with a certain magnificence.”
English
“If the meaning of life lies anywhere, then it lies not in some remote metaphysical sphere but in the way we conduct our ordinary existence — in acts of compassion, solidarity, and mutual care that are the building blocks of a just society.”
English
“Marx was not a Marxist, any more than Jesus was a Christian. Both men would have been appalled by much of what was done in their names.”
English
“In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their practical value. The humanities teach us nothing less than what it means to be human, which is not a question to which there could ever be a final answer.”
English