Top 45 Edward Said Quotes
#1. 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.
Edward Said
#2. To say that we're going to end countries or eradicate terrorism, and that it's a long war over many years, with many different instruments, suggests a much more complex and drawn-out conflict for which, I think, most Americans aren't prepared.
Edward Said
#3. No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.
Edward Said
#4. When you become a public figure, you still think, 'That's really not me; there's more to me than that.'
Edward Said
#5. Ironically, many of these 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.
Edward Said
#6. 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.
Edward Said
#7. It [9/11 event] transcended the political and moved into the metaphysical. There was a kind of cosmic, demonic quality of mind at work here, which refused to have any interest in dialogue and political organization and persuasion.
Edward Said
#8. The definition of terrorism has to be more precise, so that we are able to discriminate between, for example, what it is that the Palestinians are doing to fight the Israeli military occupation and terrorism of the sort that resulted in the World Trade Center bombing.
Edward Said
#9. I don't myself believe in a two-state solution. I believe in a one-state solution.
Edward Said
#10. Look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible.
Edward Said
#11. I was one of the first people in the Palestinian world, in the late 1970s, to say that there is no military option, either for us or for them, and I'm certainly the only well-known Arab who writes these things - and who writes exactly the same things in the Arab press that I say here.
Edward Said
#12. 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 think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.
Edward Said
#13. 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
#14. The inner me was always under attack by authority, by the way my parents wanted me to be brought up, by these English schools I went to. So I've always felt this kind of anti-authoritarian strain in me, pushing to express itself despite the obstacles.
Edward Said
#15. This [9/11 event] was bloody-minded destruction for no other reason than to do it. Note that there was no claim for these attacks. There were no demands. There were no statements. It was a silent piece of terror. This was part of nothing.
Edward Said
#16. 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, which finally changed the balance of forces inside South Africa.
Edward Said
#17. 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.
Edward Said
#18. There are no rules by which intellectuals
can know what to say or do; nor for the true
secular intellectual are there any gods to be worshiped and looked to for unwavering guidance.
Edward Said
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I have been unable to live an uncommitted or suspended life. I have not hesitated to declare my affiliation with an extremely unpopular cause.
Edward Said
#22. 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.
Edward Said
#23. The just response to this terrible event should be to go immediately to the world community, the United Nations. The rule of international law should be marshaled, but it's probably too late because the United States has never done that; it's always gone it alone.
Edward Said
#24. They [root causes of terror] come out of a long dialectic of U.S. involvement in the affairs of the Islamic world, the oil-producing world, the Arab world, the Middle East - those areas that are considered to be essential to U.S. interests and security.
Edward Said
#25. 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, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding, are necessary aspects of elaboration.
Edward Said
#26. The United States that has been involved first in the Gulf War and then in the tremendously damaging sanctions against Iraqi civilians. The United States that is the supporter of Israel against the Palestinians.
Edward Said
#27. It [destroying Twin Towers] was a leap into another realm - the realm of crazy abstractions and mythological generalities, involving people who have hijacked Islam for their own purposes. It's important not to fall into that trap and to try to respond with a metaphysical retaliation of some sort.
Edward Said
#28. ..culture is not monolithic either and is not the exclusive property of the East or West nor of the small groups of men and women.
Edward Said
#29. 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 with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.
Edward Said
#30. In 1985, a group of mujahedeen came to Washington and was greeted by President Reagan, who called them "freedom fighters." These people, by the way, don't represent Islam in any formal sense. They're not imams or sheiks. They are self-appointed warriors for Islam.
Edward Said
#31. Nothing disfigures the intellectual's public
performance as much as trimming, careful silence, patriotic bluster, and retrospective and self-dramatizing apostasy.
Edward Said
#33. The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.
Edward Said
#34. Since when does a militarily occupied people have the responsibility for a peace movement?
Edward Said
#35. There's been essentially the same analysis over and over again and very little allowance made for different views and interpretations and reflections.
Edward Said
#36. 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.
Edward Said
#37. It is sensible to begin by asking the beginning questions, why imagine power in the first place, and what is the relationship between one's motive for imagining power and the image one ends up with.
Edward Said
#38. 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.
Edward Said
#39. These actions were taken with the support and financing of the United States. How can you say this is part of U.S. adherence to international law and U.N. resolutions? The result is a kind of schizophrenic picture of the United States.
Edward Said
#40. History is written by those who win and those who dominate.
Edward Said
#41. I am for peace. And I am for a negotiated peace. But this accord is not a just peace.
Edward Said
#42. 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
#43. The other view is of the official United States, the United States of armies and interventions. The United States that in 1953 overthrew the nationalist government of Mossadegh in Iran and brought back the shah.
Edward Said
#44. 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
#45. 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.
Edward Said
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