Terry Eagleton

You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!

Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.

The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.

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.