Power Quote by Edward W. Said

““There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.””

Edward W. Said

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Power

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“Not one of our political spokespeople—the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Nasser’s time—ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we…

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“It remains the professional Orientalist's job to piece together a portrait, a restored picture as it were, of the Orient or the Oriental; fragments,…

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“Intellectual representations are the activity itself, dependent on a kind of consciousness that is skeptical, engaged, unremittingly devote to rational investigation and moral judgement;…

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“Out of this unstable mix of technocracy and national security you have a nostalgia developing for colonialism or religion—atavistic in my opinion, but some…

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“Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which…

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“Music requires a particular type of education which is simply not given to most people. And, as a result, it’s set further apart. It…

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“No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed…

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“They weren't like us and for that reason deserved to be ruled.”

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“Liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled,…

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“Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are non-coercive knowledge…

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“The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behavior issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility…

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