Edward Said Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I am for peace. And I am for a negotiated peace. But this accord is not a just peace.

I have been unable to live an uncommitted or suspended life. I have not hesitated to declare my affiliation with an extremely unpopular cause.

I don't remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result.

But I do not know whether the photograph can, or does, say things as they really are. Something has been lost. But the representation is all we have.

In the Islamic world, the U.S. is seen in two quite different ways. One view recognizes what an extraordinary country the U.S. is.

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.

Much as I have no wish to hurt anyone's feelings, my first obligation has not been to be nice but to be true to my perhaps peculiar memories, experiences and feelings.

It's very hard, for example, to justify the thirty-four-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It's very hard to justify 140 Israeli settlements and roughly 400,000 settlers.

We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies. (p. 5)

Osama bin Laden, who is a Saudi, feels himself to be a patriot because the U.S. has forces in Saudi Arabia, which is sacred because it is the land of the prophet Mohammed.

It was thought that to rally Islam against godless communism would be doing the Soviet Union a very bad turn indeed, and that, in fact, transpired.

There's been essentially the same analysis over and over again and very little allowance made for different views and interpretations and reflections.

Ironically, many of people, including Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

And in this relentlessly unfolding series of interactions, the U.S. has played a very distinctive role, which most Americans have been either shielded from or simply unaware of.

Note that there was no claim for these attacks [on 9/11]. There were no demands. There were no statements. It was a silent piece of terror.

Speaking as a New Yorker, I found it (9/11 event] a shocking and terrifying event, particularly the scale of it. At bottom, it was an implacable desire to do harm to innocent people.

[9/11] was not meant to be argued with. It wasn't part of any negotiation. No message was intended with it. It spoke for itself, which is unusual.

[Mujahedeen], by the way, don't represent Islam in any formal sense. They're not imams or sheiks. They are self-appointed warriors for Islam.

Speaking as a New Yorker, I found [September 11] a shocking and terrifying event, particularly the scale of it.

[9/11] was bloody-minded destruction for no other reason than to do it.

[One task of intellectuals is] to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are . . . limiting to human thought and communication.

human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with "other" cultures.