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There are two kinds of starry eyed idealists: those who believe in a perfect society, and those who hold that the future will be pretty much like the present. Wedged between them are the realists who recognise that the future will be a lot different , though by no means necessarily better. To claim that human affairs might feasibly be much improved is a realist position: those with their head in the clouds are the hardnosed pragmatists who behave as though chocolate chip cookies or the International Monetary Fund will still be with us in two thousand years' time. Such a view is simply the inversion of the television cartoon The Flinstones, for which the remote past is just American suburbia plus dinosaurs.
Terry Eagleton "Pretty much like ourselves" a review on Modern British Utopias 1700 - 1850

What modernity finds precious is less works of art, which are just one more commodity in the marketplace, than the idea of the aesthetic. And this reverence for the aesthetic reflects the way in which art, or at least a certain exalted notion of it, is forced in the modern age to stand for a religious transcendence which has fallen on hard times. (...) The dilemma of modern societies is that they need such strongly foundational values to legitimate their authority, but find themselves constantly discrediting them by their own rationalist behaviour. Art or literature, then, can restore an aura of mystery to a bleakly disenchanted world. And though this is a hope full of tremulous pathos, it is by no means entirely fatuous. Art, after all, has a good deal in common with religious belief, even in the most agnostic of environments. Both are symbolic forms; both distill some of the fundamental meanings of a community; both work by sign, ritual and sensuous evocation. Both aim to edify, inspire and console, as well as to confront a depth of human despair or depravity which theycan nonetheless redeem by form or grace.
Terry Eagleton "Having one's Kant and eating it" - A review of Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks 1982-90

For the Left, human beings may abuse their freedom, but they are not wholly human without it; for the Right, what matters by and large is not that we decide but what we decide.
Terry Eagleton "For the Hell of it" - A review of In Praise of Meekness: Essays on ethics and politics by Norberto Bobbio

The sacred rituals whish used to promise eternal life - burning incense, drinking the blood of the god, slaying a fatted calf - have now become the liturgy of burning off fat, drinking fruit juice and not eating calves at all.
Terry Eagleton "Good dinners pass away, so do tyrants and toothache" - A review of Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture by Jonathan Dollimore

Sexuality began in the late sixties, as an extension of radical politics into regions it had lamentably neglected. But as revolutionary energies were gradually rolled back, an increased concern with the body came to take their place. In the Seventies we had class struggle and sexuality; in the Eighties we had sexuality. Erstwhile Leninists were now card-carrying Lacanians, and everyone shifted over from production to perversion. The socialism of Guevara gave way to the somatics of Foucault and Fonda. As usual, this happened on the most spectacular scale in the United States, which had never had much grasp of socialism to begin with, and where the Left could find in the high Gallic pessimism of Foucault a sophisticated rationale for their own political paralysis. The fetish, for Freud, is that which plugs an intolerable gap; and sexuality itself has now become the greatest fetish of all. In classrooms from Berkeley to the Bronx, there's nothing more sexy than sex; and a concern with physical health has now escalated into an American national sickness.
Terry Eagleton - "It is not quite true that I have a body, and not quite true that I am one either" a review of Body Work by Peter Brooks

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