Edward Said Quotes

39 quotes in 788 categories

• Since the 1960s, we have seen the failure of the melting pot ideology. This ideology suggested that different historical, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds could be…
• 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…
• 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…
• Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist…
• Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.
• Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.
• Density, complexity, and historical-semantic value that is so strong as to make politics possible... Gramsci's insight is to have recognised that subordination, fracturing, diffusion, reproducing,…
• The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.
• 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…
• Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans are capable of reacting as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid,…
• Beginning is not only a kind of action. It is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness.
• 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…
• 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…
• I am for peace. And I am for a negotiated peace. But this accord is not a just peace.
• Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968, I started to…
• 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…
• History is written by those who win and those who dominate.
• 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…
• No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.
• I have been unable to live an uncommitted or suspended life. I have not hesitated to declare my affiliation with an extremely unpopular cause.

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