Culture Quotes

“Since the language they were writing in was not exactly their own, they tended to approach it with a finer self-consciousness than those lodged securily inside it, a self-consciousness that could then lend easily to modernist experiment. James Joyce remarked that the Irish were condemned to express themselves in a tongue not their own, but for the same reason they could reinvent it with a brio and panache which English-born authors found hard to rival. To be marginal to a language and culture is also to be freer than natives from its ruling forms and conventions, and thus to be less hamstrung by them.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture

“Goodness in the form of innocence can render you a pray to others. In a predatory world , it is not always easy to distinguish virtue from guillibility. This is one reason why there is something quaint as well as imposing about the word 'virtue'.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture

“An opinion is not to be respected simply because somebody holds it. More or less any obnoxious viewpoint one can think up is probably held by somebody somewhere. There are right-wing Afrikaners who believe that Nelson Mandela was evil.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture

“The work of art had nothing as vulgar as a social purpose.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture

“The distinction between elitism and socialism is in effect one between present and future.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture

“The nearest one could approach to truth was to cultivate a suitably ironic sense of one’s own phoniness.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture