"If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way."
Terence Francis Eagleton is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of English Literature at Lancaster University.
"Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur "Thou still unravished bride of quietness," then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary."
"Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism."
"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."
"You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism."
"The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present."
"Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism."