Edward W. 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."

(Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003)”
― Edward W. Said

“All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.”
― Edward W. Said

“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit”
― Edward W. Said

“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

“العزف فيه نوع من الندرة نظراً لسرعة زواله، يكون ثم ينتهي ثم يجب عليك أن تحمله معك في رأسك”
― Edward W. Said

“Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely “free:” “news” does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal.

For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media. ”
― Edward W. Said

“الأرض كلها فندق.. وبيتي القدس”
― Edward W. Said

“It is quiet 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

“المثقفين "تلك الشخصيات التي لا يمكن التكهّن بأدائها العلني؛ أو إخضاع تصرفها لشعار ما, أو خط حزبي تقليدي, أو عقيدة جازمة ثابتة. وما سعيت إلى اقتراحه هو وجوب بقاء المثقف أميناً لمعايير الحق الخاصة بالبؤس الإنساني والاضطهاد, رغم انتسابه الحزبي, وخلفيته القومية, وولاءاته الفطرية. ولا شيء يشوه الأداء العلني للمثقف أكثر من تغيير الآراء تتبعاً للظروف, وإلتزام الصمت الحذر, والتبجح الوطني, والردّة المتأخرة التي تصور نفسها بأسلوب مسرحي" ص14 - صَور المثقف”
― Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual

“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

“لا يوجد في الأدب نظير حقيقي للعازف، يمكن للكتاب أن يقرأ أمام جمهور لكن هدف عملهم المنطقي انتاج الصمت- القراءة الصامتة - والآن في حالة موسيقي عازف فإن فكرة الأداء بحدّ ذاته هو الهدف مما يفعله في الحياة”
― Edward W. Said

“... the connection between imperial politics and culture is astonishingly direct. American attitudes to American "greatness", to hierarchies of race, to the perils of "other" revolutions (the American revolution being considered unique and somehow unrepeatable anywhere else in the world) have remained constant, have dictated, have obscured, the realities of empire, while apologists for overseas American interests have insisted on American innocence, doing good, fighting for freedom.”
― Edward W. Said

“إحدى مهام المثقف هي بذل الجهد لتهشيم الآراء المقولبة والمقولات التصغيرية, التي تحدُّ كثيراً من الفكر الإنساني والإتصال الفكري.

ص12-13 كتاب صُوَر المثقف”
― Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual

“Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.”
― Edward W. Said

“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, Palestine

“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. (p.6)”
― Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

“Consider that in 1800 Western powers claimed 55 percent but actually held approximately 35 percent of the earth's surface, and that by 1874 the proportion was 67 percent, a rate of increase of 83,000 square miles per year. By 1914, the annual rate had risen to an astonishing 240,000 square miles [per year], and Europe held a grand total of roughly 85 percent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths. No other associated set of colonies in history was as large, none so totally dominated, none so unequal in power to the Western metropolis." Culture and Imperialism, pg. 8”
― Edward W. Said

“إنّ شعار "لا تستسلم أبدًا" قد يعني أيضّا أنك "آفة اجتماعية" تعرقل نشاطَ الآخرين وتؤخّر البرنامج وربما تبيح للمشاهدين النافدي الصبر فرصةَ التهويش على السبّاح المؤذي في بطئه والمستهتر في عناده”
― Edward W. Said

“The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing th orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“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, Culture and Imperialism

“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for... Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom.”
― Edward W. Said

“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, Out of Place

“Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors . __ Orientalism”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“Modern Orientalism embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation. Far from this being exclusively an intellectual or theoretical feature, it made Orientalism tend fatally towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories. To reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to reconstruct a dead or neglected Orient; it also meant that reconstructive precision, science, even imagination could prepare the way for what armies, administrators, and bureaucracies would later do on the ground.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism