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

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.

To me life is a journey seeking the basic of life.

I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.

Waban-aki: People from where the sun rises.

Mind severed from body, culture from planet- to lose our ground is to lose our home.

I have auditory hallucinations, I hear voices saying derogatory things, like I'm terrible and I'm going to die, and they're usually worse in the afternoon.

That amenity which the French have developed into a great art . . . conversation.

If asked to name the worst moment of his life, Michael Fisher wouldn't have hesitated to give his answer: it was when the lights went out.

I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.

If the advice is simply to respect yourself and follow the path that you want to follow, that would be the best advice I could ever pass on.

One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it.