Edward W. Said Quotes

#1. Our role is to widen the field of discussion, not to set limits in accord with the prevailing authority.

Edward W. Said

#2. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.

Edward W. Said

#3. 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.

Edward W. Said

#4. Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors . Orientalism

Edward W. Said

#5. I emphasize in it [my Orientalism] accortdingly that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other.

Edward W. Said

#6. 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.

Edward W. Said

#7. To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism.

Edward W. Said

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

Edward W. Said

#9. The appropriation of history, the historicization of the past, the narrativization of society, all of which give the novel its force, include the accumulation and differentiation of social space, space to be used for social purposes.

Edward W. Said

#10. 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.

Edward W. Said

#11. We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: Why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do?

Edward W. Said

#12. They weren't like us and for that reason deserved to be ruled.

Edward W. Said

#13. You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once - there has to be a limit

Edward W. Said

#14. 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.

Edward W. Said

#15. In a sense the limitations of Orientalism are, as I said earlier, the limitations that follow upon disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical region.

Edward W. Said

#16. 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.

Edward W. Said

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

Edward W. Said

#18. My basic point being that stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.

Edward W. Said

#19. Egypt restored to prosperity, regenerated by wise and enlightened administration ... would shed its civilizing rays upon all its Oriental neighbors.

Edward W. Said

#20. There has been no major revolution in modern history without intellectuals; conversely there has been no major counterrevolutionary movement without intellectuals. Intellectuals have been the fathers and mothers of movements, and of course sons and daughters, even nephews and nieces.

Edward W. Said

#21. 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.
(Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003)

Edward W. Said

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

Edward W. Said

#23. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.

Edward W. Said

#24. To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact.

Edward W. Said

#25. The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be "Oriental" in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be - that is, submitted to being - made Oriental.

Edward W. Said