{"author":"Terry Eagleton","author_id":"Terry+Eagleton","total_quotes":57,"quotes":[{"text":"What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.","author":"Terry Eagleton","tags":["2010","2010-uk-student-protests","academia","arthur-rimbaud","humanities","imagination","justice","margaret-thatcher","public-university","radical-politics","radicalism","reactionary-politics","rembrandt","tradition","tuition-fees-uk","university"],"id":32277,"author_id":"Terry+Eagleton"},{"text":"So there is nothing inherently subversive about pleasure. On the contrary, as Karl Marx recognized, it is a thoroughly aristocratic creed. The traditional English gentleman was so averse to unpleasurable labour that he could not even be bothered to articulate properly. Hence the patrician slur and drawl, Aristotle believed that being human was something you had to get good at through constant practice, like learning Catalan or playing the bagpipes; whereas if the English gentleman was virtuous, as he occasionally deigned to be, his goodness was purely spontaneous. Moral effort was for merchants and clerks.","author":"Terry Eagleton","tags":["class","labour","moral-effort","morality","pleasure","virtue"],"id":41390,"author_id":"Terry+Eagleton"},{"text":"[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.","author":"Terry Eagleton","tags":["2010","2010-fifa-world-cup","bolsheviks","british-petroleum","capitalism","conformists","david-beckham","deepwater-horizon-oil-spill","football","liverpool-fc","marxism","opium-of-the-people","oprah","politics","revolution","soccer","social-change","tories"],"id":47947,"author_id":"Terry+Eagleton"},{"text":"What it means to be a ‘better person’, then, must be concrete and practical — that is to say, concerned with people’s political situations as a whole — rather than narrowly abstract, concerned only with the immediate interpersonal relations which can be abstracted from this concrete whole. It must be a question of political and not only of ‘moral’ argument: that is to say, it must be genuine moral argument, which sees the relations between individual qualities and values and our whole material conditions of existence. Political argument is not an alternative to moral preoccupations: it is those preoccupations taken seriously in their full implications.","author":"Terry Eagleton","tags":["adorno","butler","morality","politics","poltical"],"id":53044,"author_id":"Terry+Eagleton"},{"text":"When they first emerged in their present shape around the turn of the 18th century, the so-called humane disciplines had a crucial social role. It was to foster and protect the kind of values for which a philistine social order had precious little time. The modern humanities and industrial capitalism were more or less twinned at birth. To preserve a set of values and ideas under siege, you needed among other things institutions known as universities set somewhat apart from everyday social life. This remoteness meant that humane study could be lamentably ineffectual. But it also allowed the humanities to launch a critique of conventional wisdom.","author":"Terry Eagleton","tags":["18th-century","capitalism","criticism","humanities","university"],"id":61756,"author_id":"Terry+Eagleton"},{"text":"Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.","author":"Terry Eagleton","tags":["evil","music","science"],"id":68770,"author_id":"Terry+Eagleton"},{"text":"The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.","author":"Terry Eagleton","tags":["academia","education","humanities","university"],"id":71028,"author_id":"Terry+Eagleton"},{"text":"In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism.","author":"Terry Eagleton","tags":["materialism","metaphysics","nietzsche","relativism","skepticism","the-west"],"id":91635,"author_id":"Terry+Eagleton"},{"text":"Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare’s imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all.","author":"Terry Eagleton","tags":["dreams","existence","literature","reality","shakespeare"],"id":100843,"author_id":"Terry+Eagleton"},{"text":"It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.","author":"Terry Eagleton","tags":["anti-capitalism","capitalism","criticisms-of-marxism","future","futures-exchange","marxism","utopianism"],"id":102710,"author_id":"Terry+Eagleton"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":57,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}