Terry Eagleton

Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees.

The liberal state has no view on whether witchcraft is more valuable than all-in wrestling. Like a tactful publican, it has as few opinions as possible. Many liberals suspect passionate convictions are latently authoritarian. But liberalism should surely be a passionate conviction. Liberals are not necessarily lukewarm. Only the more macho leftist suspects that they have no balls. You can be ardently neutral, and fiercely indifferent.

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.

The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

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.

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.

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

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

Derrida_ labels as __etaphysical_ any such thought system which depends on an unassailable foundation, a first principle or unimpeachable ground upon which a whole hierarchy of meanings may be constructed. It is not that he believes that we can merely rid ourselves of the urge to forge such first principles, for such an impulse is deeply embedded in our history, and cannot _ at least as yet _ be eradicated or ignored. Derrida would see his own work as inescapably __ontaminated_ by such metaphysical thought, much as he strives to give it the slip. But if you examine such first principles closely, you can see that they may always be __econstructed_: they can be shown to be products of a particular system of meaning, rather than what props it up from the outside.

In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.