A Quote by Terry Eagleton

Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.

Terry Eagleton

Quote Topics

Demands Forms Identity Language Life Political Shaped Terms Which

Quote Author

Terry Eagleton
English - Critic
Born: February 22, 1943

The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.

S. I. Hayakawa

Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.

Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

There's no linear narrative - the structure is more like a series of variations on a theme (how identity is shaped by language), with the past constantly bleeding into the present, dreams into reality. And the language, while incredibly lyrical in places, also has this underlying dissonance, the sense of it having itself been translated.

Deborah Smith

The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.

Amin Maalouf

Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence.

Michel Foucault

Identity politics is not politics at all, since it precisely negates the political as such by re-construing political positions in ethnic terms, subsuming 'ought' under 'is.'

Mark Fisher

All of the arts are kin - music and sculpture and dance, those are wordless art forms. But poetry is defined by language. Of course, each art is distinct, and has its own character - not just in terms of media, but in terms of what seems to lie at the heart of it.

Campbell McGrath

My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.

Olga Tokarczuk

I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.

Thom Yorke

I don’t see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right-wing, and loyal to the political framework and it’s corporate interests.

Thom Yorke

I try not to get too political. But coming from South Africa, where apartheid was a huge problem, and there was lots of inequality, has shaped me in terms of how I view certain issues.

Kevin Anderson

I do not mean to say that such institutions act unilaterally on psychic life, or that they determine certain psychic outcomes. Rather, they exploit forms of fear and insecurity that are there for any population - no political organisation of life could ever fully do away with fear and insecurity; but some work to intensify, accelerate, and make more acute forms of fear, and to provide ideological focus for such intensified fears, at which point critical thinking has a fierce rival. The critical analysis that shows precisely how those forms of fear are promulgated, and for what purpose.

Judith Butler

Italy has turned its back on its political class, and a new language of community, identity, and honesty is filling the gap.

Beppe Grillo

Amid the welter of vague political abstractions ... where meanings shift so quickly and so subtly, not only following changes of thought, but often manipulated artificially by political practitioners so as to obscure, expand, or distort ... a certain broad consistency in its relations to other kindred terms is the nearest approach to definition which such a term as Imperialism admits. Nationalism, internationalism, colonialism, its three closest congeners, are equally elusive, equally shifty, and the changeful overlapping of all four demands the closest vigilance.