Terry Eagleton Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.”

“Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.”

“The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.”

“For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.”

“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.'”

“The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.”

“God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.”

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

“It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.”

“Nothing in human life is inherently private.”