Edward Said Quotes

Quotes about:

• Part of the main plan of imperialism... is that we will give you your history, we will write it for you, we will re-order the past...What's more truly frightening is the defacement, the mutilation, and ultimately the eradication of history in order to create... an order that is favorable to the United States.

  Edward Said

  Writing, Past, Order

  68 Copy quote

• Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.

  Edward Said

  Teaching, Views, Style

  Orientalism introduction (1978)

  171 Copy quote

• History is written by those who win and those who dominate.

  Edward Said

  Winning, Written

  193 Copy quote

• Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.

  Edward Said

  Empires, World, Plunder

  199 Copy quote

• The sense of Islam as a threatening Other - with Muslims depicted as fanatical, violent, lustful, irrational - develops during the colonial period in what I called Orientalism. The study of the Other has a lot to do with the control and dominance of Europe and the West generally in the Islamic world. And it has persisted because it's based very, very deeply in religious roots, where Islam is seen as a kind of competitor of Christianity.

  Edward Said

  Religious, Islamic, Europe

  Source: progressive.org

  185 Copy quote

• Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.

  Edward Said

  Ideas, Culture, Orientalism

  Edward W. Said (2014). “Orientalism”, p.5, Vintage

  137 Copy quote

• Refuse to allow yourself to become a vegetable that simply absorbs information, pre-packaged, pre-ideologized , because no message.. is anything but an ideological package that has gone through a kind of processing.

  Edward Said

  Vegetables, Gone, Information

  65 Copy quote

• What we must eliminate are systems of representation that carry with them the authority which has become repressive because it doesn't permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented.

  Edward Said

  Rooms, Authority, Permit

  159 Copy quote

• The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire.... The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear the figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emenate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.

  Edward Said

  Europe, Orientalism, World

  "Orientalism". Book by Edward W. Said, 1978.

  188 Copy quote

• You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit

  Edward Said

  Limits, Victim, Palestine

  156 Copy quote

• Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.

  Edward Said

  Order, Tyrants, Democracy

  Edward W. Said (2014). “Orientalism”, p.21, Vintage

  123 Copy quote

• Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.

  Edward Said

  Practice, Finals, Resistance

  Edward W. Said (2014). “Orientalism”, p.29, Vintage

  153 Copy quote

• No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.

  Edward Said

  Ideas, Causes, Abstract

  Edward W. Said (2007). “From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays”, p.117, Vintage

  152 Copy quote

• Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.

  Edward Said

  Racist, Orientalism

  131 Copy quote

• We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.

  Edward Said

  Fighting, Rights, Criticism

  Edward W. Said (2007). “The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After”, p.233, Vintage

  137 Copy quote

• The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.

  Edward Said

  Other Cultures, United States, Confrontation

  "Culture and Imperialism". Book by Edward Said, Chap 4, Sect 2, 1993.

  113 Copy quote

• exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.

  Edward Said

  Home, Sadness, Thinking

  Edward W. Said (2013). “Reflections On Exile: And Other Literary And Cultural Essays”, p.212, Granta Books

  112 Copy quote

• Beginning is not only a kind of action. It is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness.

  Edward Said

  Attitude, Mind, Action

  88 Copy quote

• Power, after all, is not just military strength. It is the social power that comes from democracy, the cultural power that comes from freedom of expression and research, the personal power that entitles every Arab citizen to feel that he or she is in fact a citizen, and not just a sheep in some great shepherd's flock.

  Edward Said

  Freedom, Military, Expression

  99 Copy quote

• I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for... Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom.

  Edward Said

  Believe, Thinking, Issues

  111 Copy quote

• My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.

  Edward Said

  Men, Silence, Shapes

  103 Copy quote

• Take a young man from Gaza living in the most horrendous conditions - most of it imposed by Israel - who straps dynamite around himself and then throws himself into a crowd of Israelis. I've never condoned or agreed with it, but at least it is understandable as the desperate wish of a human being who feels himself being crowded out of life and all of his surroundings, who sees his fellow citizens, other Palestinians, his parents, sisters, and brothers, suffering, being injured, or being killed. He wants to do something, to strike back.

  Edward Said

  Brother, Men, Israel

  Source: www.progressive.org

  39 Copy quote

• Since when does a militarily occupied people have the responsibility for a peace movement?

  Edward Said

  Responsibility, People, Doe

  81 Copy quote

• I have never known what is Arabic or English, or which one was really mine beyond any doubt. What I do know, however, is that the two have always been together in my life, one resonating in the other, sometimes ironically, sometimes nostalgically, most often each correcting, and commenting on, the other. Each can seem like my absolutely first language, but neither is.

  Edward Said

  Two, Doubt, Together

  Edward W. Said (2013). “Out Of Place: A Memoir”, p.1931, Granta Books

  53 Copy quote

• All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.

  Edward Said

  Historical Knowledge, Data, Purpose

  Edward W. Said (2015). “Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World”, p.240, Vintage

  26 Copy quote

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