Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is The Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. – Terry Eagleton
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. – Terry Eagleton
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism. – Terry Eagleton
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open. – Terry Eagleton
He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. – Friedrich August von Hayek